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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14297 ***
+
+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°, 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 cafés 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 preëmpted. 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.
+
+Sierra Leone, as originally purchased in 1786, consisted of twenty
+square miles, for which among other articles of equal value King
+Naimbanna received a "crimson satin embroidered waistcoat, one
+puncheon of rum, ten pounds of beads, two cheeses, one box of
+smoking pipes, a mock diamond ring, and a tierce of pork."
+
+What first impressed me about Sierra Leone was the heat. It does not
+permit one to give his attention wholly to anything else. I always
+have maintained that the hottest place on earth is New York, and I
+have been in other places with more than a local reputation for
+heat; some along the Equator, Lourenço Marquez, which is only
+prevented from being an earthen oven because it is a swamp; the Red
+Sea, with a following breeze, and from both shores the baked heat of
+the desert, and Nagasaki, on a rainy day in midsummer.
+
+But New York in August radiating stored-up heat from iron-framed
+buildings, with the foul, dead air shut in by the skyscrapers, with
+a humidity that makes you think you are breathing through a
+steam-heated sponge, is as near the lower regions as I hope any of
+us will go. And yet Sierra Leone is no mean competitor.
+
+We climbed the moss-covered steps to the quay to face a great white
+building that blazed like the base of a whitewashed stove at white
+heat. Before it were some rusty cannon and a canoe cut out of a
+single tree, and, seated upon it selling fruit and sun-dried fish,
+some native women, naked to the waist, their bodies streaming with
+palm oil and sweat. At the same moment something struck me a blow on
+the top of the head, at the base of the spine and between the
+shoulder blades, and the ebony ladies and the white "factory" were
+burnt up in a scroll of flame.
+
+ [Illustration: A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+ Whitewashed Stove at White Heat.]
+
+I heard myself in a far-away voice asking where one could buy a sun
+helmet and a white umbrella, and until I was under their protection,
+Sierra Leone interested me no more.
+
+One sees more different kinds of black people in Sierra Leone than
+in any other port along the Coast; Senegalese and Senegambians,
+Kroo boys, Liberians, naked bush boys bearing great burdens from the
+forests, domestic slaves in fez and colored linen livery, carrying
+hammocks swung from under a canopy, the local electric hansom,
+soldiers of the W.A.F.F., the West African Frontier Force, in Zouave
+uniform of scarlet and khaki, with bare legs; Arabs from as far in
+the interior as Timbuctu, yellow in face and in long silken robes;
+big fat "mammies" in well-washed linen like the washerwomen of
+Jamaica, each balancing on her head her tightly rolled umbrella, and
+in the gardens slim young girls, with only a strip of blue and white
+linen from the waist to the knees, lithe, erect, with glistening
+teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission
+schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms.
+Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the
+tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public
+schools operated by the government as well as many others run by
+American and English missions, a club where the white "mammies," as
+all women are called, and the white officers--for Sierra Leone is a
+coaling station on the Cape route to India, and is garrisoned
+accordingly--play croquet, and bowl into a net.
+
+When the officers are not bowling they are tramping into the
+hinterland after tribes on the warpath from Liberia, and coming
+back, perhaps wounded or racked with fever, or perhaps they do not
+come back. On the day we landed they had just buried one of the
+officers. On Saturday afternoon he had been playing tennis, during
+the night the fever claimed him, and Sunday night he was dead.
+
+That night as we pulled out to the steamer there came toward us in
+black silhouette against the sun, setting blood-red into the lagoon,
+two great canoes. They were coming from up the river piled high with
+fruit and bark, with the women and children lying huddled in the
+high bow and stern, while amidships the twelve men at the oars
+strained and struggled until we saw every muscle rise under the
+black skin.
+
+As their stroke slackened, the man in the bow with the tom-tom beat
+more savagely upon it, and shouted to them in shrill sharp cries.
+Their eyes shone, their teeth clenched, the sweat streamed from
+their naked bodies. They might have been slaves chained to the
+thwarts of a trireme.
+
+Just ahead of them lay at anchor the only other ship beside our own
+in port, a two-masted schooner, the _Gladys E. Wilden_, out of
+Boston. Her captain leaned upon the rail smoking his cigar, his
+shirt-sleeves held up with pink elastics, on the back of his head a
+derby hat. As the rowers passed under his bows he looked critically
+at the streaming black bodies and spat meditatively into the water.
+His own father could have had them between decks as cargo. Now for
+the petroleum and lumber he brings from Massachusetts to Sierra
+Leone he returns in ballast.
+
+Because her lines were so home-like and her captain came from Cape
+Cod, we wanted to call on the _Gladys E. Wilden_, but our own
+captain had different views, and the two ships passed in the night,
+and the man from Boston never will know that two folks from home
+were burning signals to him.
+
+Because our next port of call, Grand Bassam, is the chief port of
+the French Ivory Coast, which is 125,000 square miles in extent, we
+expected quite a flourishing seaport. Instead, Grand Bassam was a
+bank of yellow sand, a dozen bungalows in a line, a few wind-blown
+cocoanut palms, an iron pier, and a French flag. Beyond the cocoanut
+palms we could see a great lagoon, and each minute a wave leaped
+roaring upon the yellow sand-bank and tried to hurl itself across
+it, eating up the bungalows on its way, into the quiet waters of the
+lake. Each time we were sure it would succeed, but the yellow bank
+stood like rock, and, beaten back, the wave would rise in white
+spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the
+sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet
+of the bungalows.
+
+We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who
+had come out to join her husband. His factory is a two days' launch
+ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not
+speak English. Her husband had wished her, for her health's sake, to
+stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and
+against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had
+at once set out to join him. She was a very pretty, sad, unsmiling
+young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband's partner
+questions about the new home. His answers, while they did not seem
+to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained
+safely in her London suburb.
+
+Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron
+pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her.
+
+The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and
+shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes
+staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow,
+another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the
+partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in
+white under the bridge.
+
+The husband and the young wife were swung together over the side to
+the lifting waves in a two-seated "mammy chair," like one of those
+_vis-à-vis_ swings you see in public playgrounds and picnic groves,
+and they carried with them, as a gift from Captain Burton, a fast
+melting lump of ice, the last piece of fresh meat they will taste in
+many a day, and the blessings of all the ship's company. And then,
+with inhospitable haste there was a rattle of anchor chains, a quick
+jangle of bells from the bridge to the engine-room, and the
+_Bruxellesville_ swept out to sea, leaving the girl from the London
+suburb to find her way into the heart of Africa. Next morning we
+anchored in a dripping fog off Sekondi on the Gold Coast, to allow
+an English doctor to find his way to a fever camp. For nine years he
+had been a Coaster, and he had just gone home to fit himself, by a
+winter's vacation in London, for more work along the Gold Coast. It
+is said of him that he has "never lost a life." On arriving in
+London he received a cable telling him three doctors had died, the
+miners along the railroad to Ashanti were rotten with fever, and
+that he was needed.
+
+ [Illustration: The "Mammy Chair" is Like Those Swings You See in
+ Public Playgrounds.]
+
+So he and his wife, as cheery and bright as though she were setting
+forth on her honeymoon, were going back to take up the white man's
+burden. We swung them over the side as we had the other two, and
+that night in the smoking-room the Coasters drank "Luck to him,"
+which, in the vernacular of this unhealthy shore, means "Life to
+him," and to the plucky, jolly woman who was going back to fight
+death with the man who had never lost a life.
+
+As the ship was getting under way, a young man in "whites" and a sun
+helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by
+which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled
+recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his
+helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt;
+that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for
+he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding
+as though we had been old acquaintances.
+
+"You going far?" he asked. He spoke in the soft, detached voice of
+the public-school Englishman.
+
+"To the Congo," I answered.
+
+He stood swaying with the ship, looking as though there were
+something he wished to say, and then laughed, and added gravely,
+giving me the greeting of the Coast: "Luck to you."
+
+"Luck to YOU," I said.
+
+That is the worst of these gaddings about, these meetings with men
+you wish you could know, who pass like a face in the crowded street,
+who hold out a hand, or give the password of the brotherhood, and
+then drop down the sea ladder and out of your life forever.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
+
+
+To me, the fact of greatest interest about the Congo is that it is
+owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned by
+one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not
+trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that
+in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it.
+Though backed by all the mailed fists in the German Empire, and all
+the _Dreadnoughts_ of the seas, no other modern monarch would make
+such a claim. It does not sound like anything we have heard since
+the days and the ways of Pharaoh. And the most remarkable feature of
+it is, that the man who makes this claim is the man who was placed
+over the Congo as a guardian, to keep it open to the trade of the
+world, to suppress slavery. That, in the Congo, he has killed trade
+and made the products of the land his own, that of the natives he
+did not kill he has made slaves, is what to-day gives the Congo its
+chief interest. It is well to emphasize how this one man stole a
+march on fourteen Powers, including the United States, and stole
+also an empire of one million square miles.
+
+Twenty-five years ago all of Africa was divided into many parts. The
+part which still remained to be distributed among the Powers was
+that which was watered by the Congo River and its tributaries.
+
+Along the north bank of the Congo River ran the French Congo; the
+Portuguese owned the lands to the south, and on the east it was shut
+in by protectorates and colonies of Germany and England. It was, and
+is, a territory as large, were Spain and Russia omitted, as Europe.
+Were a map of the Congo laid upon a map of Europe, with the mouth of
+the Congo River where France and Spain meet at Biarritz, the
+boundaries of the Congo would reach south to the heel of Italy, to
+Greece, to Smyrna; east to Constantinople and Odessa; northeast to
+St. Petersburg and Finland, and northwest to the extreme limits of
+Scotland. Distances in this country are so enormous, the means of
+progress so primitive, that many of the Belgian officers with whom I
+came south and who already had travelled nineteen days from Antwerp,
+had still, before they reached their posts, to steam, paddle, and
+walk for three months.
+
+In 1844 to dispose amicably of this great territory, which was much
+desired by several of the Powers, a conference was held at Berlin.
+There it was decided to make of the Congo Basin an Independent
+State, a "free-for-all" country, where every flag could trade with
+equal right, and with no special tariff or restriction.
+
+The General Act of this conference agreed: "The trade of ALL nations
+shall enjoy complete freedom." "No Power which exercises or shall
+exercise Sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions shall be
+allowed to _grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters
+of trade_." "ALL the Powers exercising Sovereign rights or influence
+in the afore-said territories bind themselves to watch over the
+preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement
+of _the condition of their moral and material welfare_, and _to
+help in suppressing slavery_." The italics are mine. These
+quotations from the act are still binding upon the fourteen Powers,
+including the United States.
+
+For several years previous to the Conference of Berlin, Leopold of
+Belgium, as a private individual, had shown much interest in the
+development of the Congo. The opening up of that territory was
+apparently his hobby. Out of his own pocket he paid for expeditions
+into the Congo Basin, employed German and English explorers, and
+protested against the then existing iniquities of the Arabs, who for
+ivory and slaves raided the Upper Congo. Finally, assisted by many
+geographical societies, he founded the International Association, to
+promote "civilization and trade" in Central Africa; and enlisted
+Henry M. Stanley in this service.
+
+That, in the early years, Leopold's interest in the Congo was
+unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now
+know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most
+unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking
+may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented
+himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of
+administrator of this new territory.
+
+On the face of it he seemed an admirable choice. He was a sovereign
+of a kingdom too unimportant to be feared; of the newly created
+State he undoubtedly possessed an intimate knowledge. He promised to
+give to the Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders, already for many
+years established on the Congo, his heartiest aid, and, for those
+traders still to come, to maintain the "open door." His professions
+of a desire to help the natives were profuse. He became the
+unanimous choice of the conference.
+
+Later he announced to the Powers signing the act, that from Belgium
+he had received the right to assume the title of King of the
+Independent State of the Congo. The Powers recognized his new title.
+
+The fact that Leopold, King of Belgium, was king also of the État
+Indépendant du Congo confused many into thinking that the Free State
+was a colony, or under the protection, of Belgium. As we have seen,
+it is not. A Belgian may serve in the army of the Free State, or in
+a civil capacity, as may a man of any nation, but, although with few
+exceptions only Belgians are employed in the Free State, and
+although to help the King in the Congo, the Belgian Government has
+loaned him great sums of money, politically and constitutionally the
+two governments are as independent of each other as France and
+Spain.
+
+And so, in 1885, Leopold, by the grace of fourteen governments, was
+appointed their steward over a great estate in which each of the
+governments still holds an equal right; a trustee and keeper over
+twenty millions of "black brothers" whose "moral and material
+welfare" each government had promised to protect.
+
+There is only one thing more remarkable than the fact that Leopold
+was able to turn this public market into a private park, and that
+is, that he has been permitted to do so. It is true he is a man of
+wonderful ability. For his own ends he is a magnificent organizer.
+But in the fourteen governments that created him there have been,
+and to-day there are, men, if less unscrupulous, of quite as great
+ability; statesmen, jealous and quick to guard the rights of the
+people they represent, people who since the twelfth century have
+been traders, who since 1808 have declared slavery abolished.
+
+And yet, for twenty-five years these statesmen have watched Leopold
+disobey every provision in the act of the conference. Were they to
+visit the Congo, they could see for themselves the jungle creeping
+in and burying their trading posts, their great factories turned
+into barracks. They know that the blacks they mutually agreed to
+protect have been reduced to slavery worse than that they suffered
+from the Arabs, that hundreds of thousands of them have fled from
+the Congo, and that those that remain have been mutilated, maimed,
+or, what was more merciful, murdered. And yet the fourteen
+governments, including the United States, have done nothing.
+
+Some tell you they do not interfere because they are jealous one of
+the other; others say that it is because they believe the Congo will
+soon be taken over by Belgium, and with Belgium in control, they
+argue, they would be dealing with a responsible government, instead
+of with a pirate. But so long as Leopold is King of Belgium one
+doubts if Belgians in the Congo would rise above the level of their
+King. The English, when asked why they do not assert their rights,
+granted not only to them, but to thirteen other governments, reply
+that if they did they would be accused of "ulterior motives." What
+ulterior motives? If you pursue a pickpocket and recover your watch
+from him, are your motives in doing so open to suspicion?
+
+Personally, although this is looking some way ahead, I would like to
+see the English take over and administrate the Congo. Wherever I
+visit a colony governed by Englishmen I find under their
+administration, in spite of opium in China and gin on the West
+Coast, that three people are benefited: the Englishman, the native,
+and the foreign trader from any other part of the world. Of the
+colonies of what other country can one say the same?
+
+As a rule our present governments are not loath to protect their
+rights. But toward asserting them in the Congo they have been moved
+neither by the protests of traders, chambers of commerce,
+missionaries, the public press, nor by the cry of the black man to
+"let my people go." By only those in high places can it be
+explained. We will leave it as a curious fact, and return to the
+"Unjust Steward."
+
+His first act was to wage wars upon the Arabs. From the Soudan and
+from the East Coast they were raiding the Congo for slaves and
+ivory, and he drove them from it. By these wars he accomplished two
+things. As the defender of the slave, he gained much public credit,
+and he kept the ivory. But war is expensive, and soon he pointed out
+to the Powers that to ask him out of his own pocket to maintain
+armies in the field and to administer a great estate was unfair. He
+humbly sought their permission to levy a few taxes. It seemed a
+reasonable request. To clear roads, to keep boats upon the great
+rivers, to mark it with buoys, to maintain wood stations for the
+steamers, to improve the "moral and material welfare of the
+natives," would cost money, and to allow Leopold to bring about
+these improvements, which would be for the good of all, he was
+permitted to levy the few taxes. That was twenty years ago; to-day I
+saw none of these improvements, and the taxes have increased.
+
+From the first they were so heavy that the great trade houses, which
+for one hundred years in peace and mutual goodwill bartered with the
+natives, found themselves ruined. It was not alone the export taxes,
+lighterage dues, port dues, and personal taxes that drove them out
+of the Congo; it was the King appearing against them as a rival
+trader, the man appointed to maintain the "open door." And a trader
+with methods they could not or would not imitate. Leopold, or the
+"State," saw for the existence of the Congo only two reasons: Rubber
+and Ivory. And the collecting of this rubber and ivory was, as he
+saw it, the sole duty of the State and its officers. When he threw
+over the part of trustee and became the Arab raider he could not
+waste his time, which, he had good reason to fear, might be short,
+upon products that, if fostered, would be of value only in later
+years. Still less time had he to give to improvements that cost
+money and that would be of benefit to his successors. He wanted only
+rubber; he wanted it at once, and he cared not at all how he
+obtained it. So he spun, and still spins, the greatest of all
+"get-rich-quick" schemes; one of gigantic proportions, full of
+tragic, monstrous, nauseous details.
+
+The only possible way to obtain rubber is through the native; as
+yet, in teeming forests, the white man can not work and live. Of
+even Chinese coolies imported here to build a railroad ninety per
+cent. died. So, with a stroke of the pen, Leopold declared all the
+rubber in the country the property of the "State," and then, to make
+sure that the natives would work it, ordered that taxes be paid in
+rubber. If, once a month (in order to keep the natives steadily at
+work the taxes were ordered to be paid each month instead of once a
+year), each village did not bring in so many baskets of rubber the
+King's cannibal soldiers raided it, carried off the women as
+hostages, and made prisoners of the men, or killed and ate them. For
+every kilo of rubber brought in in excess of the quota the King's
+agent, who received the collected rubber and forwarded it down the
+river, was paid a commission. Or was "paid by results." Another
+bonus was given him based on the price at which he obtained the
+rubber. If he paid the native only six cents for every two pounds,
+he received a bonus of three cents, the cost to the State being but
+nine cents per kilo, but, if he paid the natives twelve cents for
+every two pounds, he received as a bonus less than one cent. In a
+word, the more rubber the agent collected the more he personally
+benefited, and if he obtained it "cheaply" or for nothing--that is,
+by taking hostages, making prisoners, by the whip of hippopotamus
+hide, by torture--so much greater his fortune, so much richer
+Leopold.
+
+ [Illustration: A Village on the Kasai River.]
+
+Few schemes devised have been more cynical, more devilish, more
+cunningly designed to incite a man to cruelty and abuse. To
+dishonesty it was an invitation and a reward. It was this system of
+"payment by results," evolved by Leopold sooner than allow his
+agents a fixed and sufficient wage, that led to the atrocities.
+
+One result of this system was that in seven years the natives
+condemned to slavery in the rubber forests brought in rubber to the
+amount of fifty-five millions of dollars. But its chief results were
+the destruction of entire villages, the flight from their homes in
+the Congo of hundreds of thousands of natives, and for those that
+remained misery, death, the most brutal tortures and degradations,
+unprintable, unthinkable.
+
+I am not going to enter into the question of the atrocities. In the
+Congo the tip has been given out from those higher up at Brussels to
+"close up" the atrocities; and for the present the evil places in
+the Tenderloin and along the Broadway of the Congo are tightly shut.
+But at those lonely posts, distant a month to three months' march
+from the capital, the cruelties still continue. I did not see them.
+Neither, last year, did a great many people in the United States see
+the massacre of blacks in Atlanta. But they have reason to believe
+it occurred. And after one has talked with the men and women who
+have seen the atrocities, has seen in the official reports that
+those accused of the atrocities do not deny having committed them,
+but point out that they were merely obeying orders, and after one
+has seen that even at the capital of Boma all the conditions of
+slavery exist, one is assured that in the jungle, away from the
+sight of men, all things are possible. Merchants, missionaries, and
+officials even in Leopold's service told me that if one could spare
+a year and a half, or a year, to the work in the hinterland he would
+be an eye-witness of as cruel treatment of the natives as any that
+has gone before, and if I can trust myself to weigh testimony and
+can believe my eyes and ears I have reason to know that what they
+say is true. I am convinced that to-day a man, who feels that a year
+and a half is little enough to give to the aid of twenty millions of
+human beings, can accomplish in the Congo as great and good work as
+that of the Abolitionists.
+
+Three years ago atrocities here were open and above-board. For
+instance. In the opinion of the State the soldiers, in killing game
+for food, wasted the State cartridges, and in consequence the
+soldiers, to show their officers that they did not expend the
+cartridges extravagantly on antelope and wild boar, for each empty
+cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or
+child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts
+along the river. They are no longer in evidence. Neither is the
+flower-bed of Lieutenant Dom, which was bordered with human skulls.
+A quaint conceit.
+
+The man to blame for the atrocities, for each separate atrocity, is
+Leopold. Had he shaken his head they would have ceased. When the hue
+and cry in Europe grew too hot for him and he held up his hand they
+did cease. At least along the main waterways. Years before he could
+have stopped them. But these were the seven fallow years, when
+millions of tons of red rubber were being dumped upon the wharf at
+Antwerp; little, roughly rolled red balls, like pellets of
+coagulated blood, which had cost their weight in blood, which would
+pay Leopold their weight in gold.
+
+He can not plead ignorance. Of all that goes on in his big
+plantation no man has a better knowledge. Without their personal
+honesty, he follows every detail of the "business" of his rubber
+farm with the same diligence that made rich men of George Boldt and
+Marshall Field. Leopold's knowledge is gained through many spies, by
+voluminous reports, by following up the expenditure of each centime,
+of each arm's-length of blue cloth. Of every Belgian employed on
+his farm, and ninety-five per cent. are Belgians, he holds the
+_dossier_; he knows how many kilos a month the agent whips out of
+his villages, how many bottles of absinthe he smuggles from the
+French side, whether he lives with one black woman or five, why his
+white wife in Belgium left him, why he left Belgium, why he dare not
+return. The agent knows that Leopold, King of the Belgians, knows,
+and that he has shared that knowledge with the agent's employer, the
+man who by bribes of rich bonuses incites him to crime, the man who
+could throw him into a Belgian jail, Leopold, King of the Congo.
+
+The agent decides for him it is best to please both Leopolds, and
+Leopold makes no secret of what best pleases him. For not only is he
+responsible for the atrocities, in that he does not try to suppress
+them, but he is doubly guilty in that he has encouraged them. This
+he has done with cynical, callous publicity, without effort at
+concealment, without shame. Men who, in obtaining rubber, committed
+unspeakable crimes, the memory of which makes other men
+uncomfortable in their presence, Leopold rewarded with rich
+bonuses, pensions, higher office, gilt badges of shame, and rapid
+advancement. To those whom even his own judges sentenced to many
+years' imprisonment he promptly granted the royal pardon, promoted,
+and sent back to work in the vineyard.
+
+"That is the sort of man for _me_," his action seemed to say. "See
+how I value that good and faithful servant. That man collected much
+rubber. You observe I do not ask how he got it. I will not ask you.
+All you need do is to collect rubber. Use our improved methods. Gum
+copal rubbed in the kinky hair of the chief and then set on fire
+burns, so my agents tell me, like vitriol. For collecting rubber the
+chief is no longer valuable, but to his successor it is an
+object-lesson. Let me recommend also the _chicotte_, the torture
+tower, the 'hostage' house, and the crucifix. Many other stimulants
+to labor will no doubt suggest themselves to you and to your
+cannibal 'sentries.' Help to make me rich, and don't fear the
+'State.' '_L'Etat, c'est moi!_' Go as far as you like!"
+
+I said the degradations and tortures practised by the men "working
+on commission" for Leopold are unprintable, but they have been
+printed, and those who wish to read a calmly compiled, careful, and
+correct record of their deeds will find it in the "Red Rubber" of
+Mr. E.R. Morel. An even better book by the same authority, on the
+whole history of the State, is his "King Leopold's Rule in the
+Congo." Mr. Morel has many enemies. So, early in the nineteenth
+century, had the English Abolitionists, Wilberforce and Granville
+Sharp. After they were dead they were buried in the Abbey, and their
+portraits were placed in the National Gallery. People who wish to
+assist in freeing twenty millions of human beings should to-day
+support Mr. Morel. It will be of more service to the blacks than,
+after he is dead, burying him in Westminster Abbey.
+
+Mr. Morel, the American and English missionaries, and the English
+Consul, Roger Casement, and other men, in Belgium, have made a
+magnificent fight against Leopold; but the Powers to whom they have
+appealed have been silent. Taking courage of this silence, Leopold
+has divided the Congo into several great territories in which the
+sole right to work rubber is conceded to certain persons. To those
+who protested that no one in the Congo "Free" State but the King
+could trade in rubber, Leopold, as an answer, pointed with pride at
+the preserves of these foreigners. And he may well point at them
+with pride, for in some of those companies he owns a third, and in
+most of them he holds a half, or a controlling interest. The
+directors of the foreign companies are his cronies, members of his
+royal household, his brokers, bankers. You have only to read the
+names published in the lists of the Brussels Stock Exchange to see
+that these "trading companies," under different aliases, are
+Leopold. Having, then, "conceded" the greater part of the Congo to
+himself, Leopold set aside the best part of it, so far as rubber is
+concerned, as a _Domaine Privé_. Officially the receipts of this pay
+for running the government, and for schools, roads and wharfs, for
+which taxes were levied, but for which, after twenty years, one
+looks in vain. Leopold claims that through the Congo he is out of
+pocket; that this carrying the banner of civilization in Africa
+does not pay. Through his press bureaus he tells that his sympathy
+for his black brother, his desire to see the commerce of the world
+busy along the Congo, alone prevents him giving up what is for him a
+losing business. There are several answers to this. One is that in
+the Kasai Company alone Leopold owns 2,010 shares of stock. Worth
+originally $50 a share, the value of each share rose to $3,100,
+making at one time his total shares worth $5,421,000. In the
+A.B.I.R. Concession he owns 1,000 shares, originally worth $100
+each, later worth $940. In the "vintage year" of 1900 each of these
+shares was worth $5,050, and the 1,000 shares thus rose to the value
+of $5,050,000.
+
+These are only two companies. In most of the others half the shares
+are owned by the King.
+
+As published in the "State Bulletin," the money received in eight
+years for rubber and ivory gathered in the _Domaine Privé_ differs
+from the amount given for it in the market at Antwerp. The official
+estimates show a loss to the government. The actual sales show that
+the government, over and above its own estimate of its expenses,
+instead of losing, made from the _Domaine Privé_ alone $10,000,000.
+We are left wondering to whom went that unaccounted-for $10,000,000.
+Certainly the King would not take it, for, to reimburse himself for
+his efforts, he early in the game reserved for himself another tract
+of territory known as the _Domaine de la Couronne_. For years he
+denied that this existed. He knew nothing of Crown Lands. But, at
+last, in the Belgian Chamber, it was publicly charged that for years
+from this private source, which he had said did not exist, Leopold
+had been drawing an income of $15,000,000. Since then the truth of
+this statement has been denied, but at the time in the Chamber it
+was not contradicted.
+
+To-day, grown insolent by the apathy of the Powers, Leopold finds
+disguising himself as a company, as a laborer worthy of his hire,
+irksome. He now decrees that as "Sovereign" over the Congo all of
+the Congo belongs to him. It is as much his property as is a
+pheasant drive, as is a staked-out mining claim, as your hat is your
+property. And the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are there
+only on his sufferance. They are his "tenants." He permits each
+the hut in which he lives, and the garden adjoining that hut, but
+his work must be for Leopold, and everything else, animal, mineral,
+or vegetable, belongs to Leopold. The natives not only may not sell
+ivory or rubber to independent traders, but if it is found in their
+possession it is seized; and if you and I bought a tusk of ivory
+here it would be taken from us and we could be prosecuted. This is
+the law. Other men rule over territories more vast even than the
+Congo. The King of England rules an empire upon which the sun never
+sets. But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even
+the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could
+not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going
+into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa
+and saying: "This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must
+not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American. If they
+buy from you they are 'receivers of stolen goods.' To feed my
+soldiers you must drag my river for my fish. For me, in my swamp and
+in my jungle, you must toil twenty-four days of each month to
+gather my rubber. You must not hunt the elephants, for they are my
+elephants. Those tusks that fifty years ago your grandfather, with
+his naked spear, cut from an elephant, and which you have tried to
+hide from me under the floor of this hut, are my ivory. Because that
+elephant, running wild through the jungle fifty years ago, belonged
+to me. And you yourself are mine, your time is mine, your labor is
+mine, your wife, your children, all are mine. They belong to me."
+
+ [Illustration: "Tenants" of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+ Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+ Tenants.]
+
+This, then, is the "open door" as I find it to-day in the Congo. It
+is an incredible state of affairs, so insolent, so magnificent in
+its impertinence, that it would be humorous, were it not for its
+background of misery and suffering, for its hostage houses, its
+chain gangs, its _chicottes_, its nameless crimes against the human
+body, its baskets of dried hands held up in tribute to the Belgian
+blackguard.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO
+
+
+Leopold's "shop" has its front door at Banana. Its house flag is a
+golden star on a blue background. Banana is the port of entry to the
+Congo. You have, no doubt, seen many ports of Europe--Antwerp,
+Hamburg, Boulogne, Lisbon, Genoa, Marseilles. Banana is the port of
+entry to a country as large as Western Europe, and while the imports
+and exports of Europe trickle through all these cities, the commerce
+of the Congo enters and departs entirely at Banana. You can then
+picture the busy harbor, the jungle of masts, the white bridges and
+awnings of the steamers. By the fat funnels and the flags you can
+distinguish the English tramps, the German merchantmen, the French,
+Dutch, Italian, Portuguese traders, the smart "liners" from
+Liverpool, even the Arab dhows with bird-wing sails, even the steel,
+four-masted schooners out of Boston, U.S.A. You can imagine the
+toiling lighters, the slap-dash tenders, the launches with shrieking
+whistles.
+
+Of course, you suspect it is not a bit like that. But were it for
+fourteen countries the "open door" to twenty millions of people,
+that is how it might look.
+
+Instead, it is the private entrance to the preserves of a private
+individual. So what you really see is, on the one hand, islands of
+mangrove bushes, with their roots in the muddy water; on the other,
+Banana, a strip of sand and palm trees without a wharf, quay,
+landing stage, without a pier to which you could make fast anything
+larger than a rowboat.
+
+In a canoe naked natives paddle alongside to sell fish; a peevish
+little man in a sun hat, who, in order to save Leopold three
+salaries, holds four port offices, is being rowed to the gangway; on
+shore the only other visible inhabitant of Banana, a man with no
+nerves, is disturbing the brooding, sweating silence by knocking the
+rust off the plates of a stranded mud-scow. Welcome to our city!
+Welcome to busy, bustling Banana, the port of entry of the Congo
+Free State.
+
+ [Illustration: The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+ Entry to the Congo, Are Limited.]
+
+In a canoe we were paddled to the back yard of the café of Madame
+Samuel, and from that bower of warm beer and sardine tins trudged
+through the sun up one side of Banana and down the other. In between
+the two paths were the bungalows and gardens of forty white men and
+two white women. Many of the gardens, as was most of Banana, were
+neglected, untidy, littered with condensed-milk tins. Others, more
+carefully tended, were laid out in rigid lines. With all tropical
+nature to draw upon, nothing had been imagined. The most ambitious
+efforts were designs in whitewashed shells and protruding beer
+bottles. We could not help remembering the gardens in Japan, of the
+poorest and the most ignorant coolies. Do I seem to find fault with
+Banana out of all proportion to its importance? It is because
+Banana, the Congo's most advanced post of civilization, is typical
+of all that lies beyond.
+
+From what I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy,
+malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy,
+monotonous, depressing.
+
+But on the way to Boma and, later, when I travelled on the Upper
+Congo, I thought the river more beautiful than any great river I had
+ever seen. It was full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes it ran
+between palm-covered banks of yellow sand as low as those of the
+Mississippi or the Nile; and again, in half an hour, the banks were
+rock and as heavily wooded as the mountains of Montana, or as white
+and bold as the cliffs of Dover, or we passed between great hills,
+covered with what looked like giant oaks, and with their peaks
+hidden in the clouds. I found it like no other river, because in
+some one particular it was like them all. Between Banana and Boma
+the banks first screened us in with the tangled jungle of the
+tropics, and then opened up great wind-swept plateaux, leading to
+hills that suggested--of all places--England, and, at that,
+cultivated England. The contour of the hills, the shape of the
+trees, the shade of their green contrasted with the green of the
+grass, were like only the cliffs above Plymouth. One did not look
+for native kraals and the wild antelope, but for the square,
+ivy-topped tower of the village church, the loaf-shaped hayricks,
+slow-moving masses of sheep. But this that looks like a pasture
+land is only coarse limestone covered with bitter, unnutritious
+grass, which benefits neither beast nor man.
+
+At sunset we anchored in the current three miles from Boma, and at
+daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the
+government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor,
+who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper
+and as a king by divine right. He is a figurehead. The real
+administrator is M. Vandamme, the Secrétaire-Général, the
+ubiquitous, the mysterious, whose name before you leave Southampton
+is in the air, of whom all men, whether they speak in French or
+English, speak well. It is from Boma that M. Vandamme sends
+collectors of rubber, politely labeled inspecteurs, directeurs,
+judges, capitaines, and sous-lieutenants to their posts, and
+distributes them over one million square miles.
+
+Boma is the capital of a country which is as large as six nations of
+the European continent. For twenty-five years it has been the
+capital. Therefore, the reader already guesses that Boma has only
+one wharf, and at that wharf there is no custom-house, no warehouse,
+not even a canvas awning under which, during the six months of rainy
+season, one might seek shelter for himself and his baggage.
+
+Our debarkation reminded me of a landing of filibusters. A wharf
+forty yards long led from the steamer to the bank. Down this marched
+the officers of the army, the clerks, the bookkeepers, and on the
+bank and in the street each dumped his boxes, his sword, his
+camp-bed, his full-dress helmet. It looked as though a huge eviction
+had taken place, as though a retreating army, having gained the
+river's edge, were waiting for a transport. It was not as though to
+the government the coming of these gentlemen was a complete
+surprise; regularly every three weeks at that exact spot a like
+number disembark. But in years the State has not found it worth
+while to erect for them even an open zinc shed. The cargo invoiced
+to the State is given equal consideration.
+
+"Prisoners of the State," each wearing round his neck a steel ring
+from which a chain stretches to the ring of another "prisoner,"
+carried the cargo to the open street, where lay the luggage of the
+officers, and there dropped it. Mingled with steamer chairs, tin
+bathtubs, gun-cases, were great crates of sheet iron, green boxes of
+gin, bags of Teneriffe potatoes, boilers of an engine. Upon the
+scene the sun beat with vicious, cruel persistence. Those officers
+who had already served in the Congo dropped their belongings under
+the shadow of a solitary tree. Those who for the first time were
+seeing the capital of the country they had sworn to serve sank upon
+their boxes and, with dismay in their eyes, mopped their red and
+dripping brows.
+
+ [Illustration: "Prisoners" of the State in Chains at Matadi.]
+
+Boma is built at the foot of a hill of red soil. It is a town of
+scattered buildings made of wood and sheet-iron plates, sent out in
+crates, and held together with screws. To Boma nature has been
+considerate. She has contributed many trees, two or three long
+avenues of palms, and in the many gardens caused flowers to blossom
+and flourish. In the report of the "Commission of Enquiry" which
+Leopold was forced to send out in 1904 to investigate the
+atrocities, and each member of which, for his four months' work,
+received $20,000, Boma is described as possessing "the daintiness
+and _chic_ of a European watering-place."
+
+Boma really is like a seaport of one of the Central American republics.
+It has a temporary sufficient-to-the-day-for-to-morrow-we-die air.
+It looks like a military post that at any moment might be abandoned.
+To remove this impression the State has certain exhibits which seem
+to point to a stable and good government. There is a well-conducted
+hospital and clean, well-built barracks; for the amusement of the
+black soldiers even a theatre, and for the higher officials
+attractive bungalows, a bandstand, where twice a week a negro band
+plays by ear, and plays exceedingly well. There is even a
+lawn-tennis court, where the infrequent visitor to the Congo is
+welcomed, and, by the courteous Mr. Vandamme, who plays tennis as
+well as he does every thing else, entertained. Boma is the shop
+window of Leopold's big store. The good features of Boma are like
+those attractive articles one sometimes sees in a shop window, but
+which in the shop one fails to find--at least, I did not find them
+in the shop. Outside of Boma I looked in vain for a school
+conducted by the State, like the one at Boma, such as those the
+United States Government gave by the hundred to the Philippines. I
+found not one. And I looked for such a hospital as the one I saw at
+Boma, such as our government has placed for its employes along, and
+at both ends of, the Isthmus of Panama, and, except for the one at
+Leopoldville, I saw none.
+
+In spite of the fact that Boma is a "European watering-place," all
+the servants of the State with whom I talked wanted to get away from
+it, especially those who already had served in the interior. To
+appreciate what Boma lacks one has only to visit the neighboring
+seaports on the same coast; the English towns of Sierra Leone and
+Calabar, the French town of Libreville in the French Congo, the
+German seaport Duala in the Cameroons, but especially Calabar in
+Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years
+younger than Boma, and in its municipal government, its
+street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons,
+hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital;
+it is the distributing factory for a huge trading concern, and a
+particularly selfish one. There is, as I have said, only one wharf,
+and at that wharf, without paying the State, only State boats may
+discharge cargo, so the English, Dutch, and German boats are forced
+to "tie up" along the river front. There the grass is eight feet
+high and breeds mosquitoes and malaria, and conceals the wary
+crocodile. At night, from the deck of the steamer, all one can see
+of this capital is a fringe of this high grass in the light from the
+air ports, and on shore three gas-lamps. No cafés are open, no
+sailors carouse, no lighted window suggests that some one is giving
+a dinner, that some one is playing bridge. Darkness, gloom, silence
+mark this "European watering-place."
+
+"You ask me," demanded a Belgian lieutenant one night as we stood
+together by the rail, "whether I like better the bush, where there
+is no white man in a hundred miles, or to be stationed at Boma?"
+
+He threw out his hands at the gas-lamps, rapidly he pointed at each
+of them in turn.
+
+"Voilà, Boma!" he said.
+
+From Boma we steamed six hours farther up the river to Matadi. On
+the way we stopped at Noqui, the home of Portuguese traders on the
+Portuguese bank, which, as one goes up-stream, lies to starboard.
+Here the current runs at from four to five miles an hour, and has so
+sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with
+the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used
+more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to
+see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank
+looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her
+propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, cutting
+the eel-grass.
+
+At Matadi the Congo makes one of her lightning changes. Her banks,
+which have been low and woody, with, on the Portuguese side,
+glimpses of boundless plateaux, become towering hills of rock. At
+Matadi the cataracts and rapids begin, and for two hundred miles
+continue to Stanley Pool, which is the beginning of the Upper Congo.
+Leopoldville is situated on Stanley Pool, just to the right of where
+the rapids start their race to the south. With Leopoldville above
+and Boma below, still nearer the mouth of the river, Matadi makes a
+centre link in the chain of the three important towns of the Lower
+Congo.
+
+When Henry M. Stanley was halted by the cataracts and forced to
+leave the river he disembarked his expedition on the bank opposite
+Matadi, and a mile farther up-stream. It was from this point he
+dragged and hauled his boats, until he again reached smooth water at
+Stanley Pool. The wagons on which he carried the boats still can be
+seen lying on the bank, broken and rusty. Like the sight of old gun
+carriages and dismantled cannon, they give one a distinct thrill.
+Now, on the bank opposite from where they lie, the railroad runs
+from Matadi to Leopoldville.
+
+The Congo forces upon one a great admiration for Stanley. Unless
+civilization utterly alters it, it must always be a monument to his
+courage, and as you travel farther and see the difficulties placed
+in his way, your admiration increases. There are men here who make
+little of what Stanley accomplished; but they are men who seldom
+leave their own compound, and, who, when they do go up the river,
+travel at ease, not in a canoe, or on foot through the jungle, but
+in the smoking-room of the steamer and in a first-class railroad
+carriage. That they are able so to travel is due to the man they
+would belittle. The nickname given to Stanley by the natives is
+to-day the nickname of the government. Matadi means rock. When
+Stanley reached the town of Matadi, which is surrounded entirely by
+rock, he began with dynamite to blast roads for his caravan. The
+natives called him Bula Matadi, the Breaker of Rocks, and, as in
+those days he was the Government, the Law, and the Prophets, Bula
+Matadi, who then was the white man who governed, now signifies the
+white man's government. But it is a very different government, and a
+very different white man. With the natives the word is universal.
+They say "Bula Matadi wood post." "Not traders' chop, Bula Matadi's
+chop." "Him no missionary steamer, him Bula Matadi steamer."
+
+The town of Matadi is of importance as the place where, owing to the
+rapids, passengers and cargoes are reshipped on the railroad to the
+_haut Congo_. It is a railroad terminus only, and it looks it. The
+railroad station and store-houses are close to the river bank, and,
+spread over several acres of cinders, are the railroad yard and
+machine shops. Above those buildings of hot corrugated zinc and the
+black soil rises a great rock. It is not so large as Gibraltar, or
+so high as the Flatiron Building, but it is a little more steep than
+either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat
+stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove
+lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their
+surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your
+stomach, and the soles of your mosquito boots. The three streets
+lead to a parade ground no larger than and as bare as a brickyard.
+It is surrounded by the buildings of Bula Matadi, the post-office,
+the custom-house, the barracks, and the Café Franco-Belge. It has a
+tableland fifty yards wide of yellow clay so beaten by thousands of
+naked feet, so baked by the heat, that it is as hard as a brass
+shield. Other tablelands may be higher, but this is the one nearest
+the sun. You cross it wearily, in short rushes, with your heart in
+your throat, and seeking shade, as a man crossing the zone of fire
+seeks cover from the bullets. When you reach the cool, dirty
+custom-house, with walls two feet thick, you congratulate yourself
+on your escape; you look back into the blaze of the flaming plaza
+and wonder if you have the courage to return.
+
+ [Illustration: Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade.]
+
+At the custom-house I paid duty on articles I could not possibly
+have bought anywhere in the Congo, as, for instance, a tent and a
+folding-bed, and for a license to carry arms. A young man with a
+hammer and tiny branding irons beat little stars and the number of
+my license to _porter d'armes_ on the stock of each weapon. Without
+permission of Bula Matadi on leaving the Congo, one can not sell his
+guns, or give them away. This is a precaution to prevent weapons
+falling into the hands of the native. For some reason a native with
+a gun alarms Bula Matadi. Just on the other bank of the river the
+French, who do not seem to fear the black brother, sell him
+flint-lock rifles, as many as his heart desires.
+
+On the steamer there was a mild young missionary coming out, for the
+first time, to whom some unobserving friend had given a fox-terrier.
+The young man did not care for the dog. He had never owned a dog,
+and did not know what to do with this one. Her name was "Fanny,"
+and only by the efforts of all on board did she reach the Congo
+alive. There was no one, from the butcher to the captain, including
+the passengers, who had not shielded Fanny from the cold, and later
+from the sun, fed her, bathed her, forced medicine down her throat,
+and raced her up and down the spar deck. Consequently we all knew
+Fanny, and it was a great shock when from the custom-house I saw her
+running around the blazing parade ground, her eyes filled with fear
+and "lost dog" written all over her, from her drooping tongue to her
+drooping tail. Captain Burton and I called "Fanny," and, not seeking
+suicide for ourselves, sent half a dozen black boys to catch her.
+But Fanny never liked her black uncles; on the steamer the Kroo boys
+learned to give her the length of her chain, and so we were forced
+to plunge to her rescue into the valley of heat. Perhaps she thought
+we were again going to lock her up on the steamer, or perhaps that
+it was a friendly game, for she ran from us as fast as from the
+black boys. In Matadi no one ever had crossed the parade ground
+except at a funeral march, and the spectacle of two large white
+men playing tag with a small fox-terrier attracted an immense
+audience. The officials and clerks left work and peered between the
+iron-barred windows, the "prisoners" in chains ceased breaking rock
+and stared dumbly from the barracks, the black "sentries" shrieked
+and gesticulated, the naked bush boys, in from a long caravan
+journey, rose from the side of their burdens and commented upon our
+manoeuvres in gloomy, guttural tones. I suspect they thought we
+wanted Fanny for "chop." Finally Fanny ran into the legs of a German
+trader, who grabbed her by the neck and held her up to us.
+
+"You want him? Hey?" he shouted.
+
+"Ay, man," gasped Burton, now quite purple, "did you think we were
+trying to amuse the dog?"
+
+I made a leash of my belt, and the captain returned to the ship
+dragging his prisoner after him. An hour later I met the youthful
+missionary leading Fanny by a rope.
+
+"I must tell you about Fanny," he cried. "After I took her to the
+Mission I forgot to tie her up--as I suppose I should have done--and
+she ran away. But, would you believe it, she found her way straight
+back to the ship. Was it not intelligent of her?"
+
+I was too far gone with apoplexy, heat prostration, and sunstroke to
+make any answer, at least one that I could make to a missionary.
+
+The next morning Fanny, the young missionary, and I left for
+Leopoldville on the railroad. It is a narrow-gauge railroad built
+near Matadi through the solid rock and later twisting and turning so
+often that at many places one can see the track on three different
+levels. It is not a State road, but was built and is owned by a
+Dutch company, and, except that it charges exorbitant rates and does
+not keep its carriages clean, it is well run, and the road-bed is
+excellent. But it runs a passenger train only three times a week,
+and though the distance is so short, and though the train starts at
+6:30 in the morning, it does not get you to Leopoldville the same
+day. Instead, you must rest over night at Thysville and start at
+seven the next morning. That afternoon at three you reach
+Leopoldville. For the two hundred and fifty miles the fare is two
+hundred francs, and one is limited to sixty pounds of luggage. That
+was the weight allowed by the Japanese to each war correspondent,
+and as they gave us six months in Tokio in which to do nothing else
+but weigh our equipment, I left Matadi without a penalty. Had my
+luggage exceeded the limit, for each extra pound I would have had to
+pay the company ten cents. To the Belgian officers and agents who go
+for three years to serve the State in the bush the regulation is
+especially harsh, and in a company so rich, particularly mean. To
+many a poor officer, and on the pay they receive there are no rich
+ones, the tax is prohibitive. It forces them to leave behind
+medicines, clothing, photographic supplies, all ammunition, which
+means no chance of helping out with duck and pigeon the daily menu
+of goat and tinned sausages, and, what is the greatest hardship, all
+books. This regulation, which the State permitted to the
+concessionaires of the railroad, sends the agents of the State into
+the wilderness physically and mentally unequipped, and it is no
+wonder the weaker brothers go mad, and act accordingly.
+
+My black boys travelled second-class, which means an open car with
+narrow seats very close together and a wooden roof. On these cars
+passengers are allowed twenty pounds of luggage and permitted to
+collect two hundred and fifty miles of heat and dust. To a black boy
+twenty pounds is little enough, for he travels with much more
+baggage than an average "blanc." I am not speaking of the Congo boy.
+All the possessions the State leaves him he could carry in his
+pockets, and he has no pockets. But wherever he goes the Kroo boy,
+Mendi boy, or Sierra Leone boy carries all his belongings with him
+in a tin trunk painted pink, green, or yellow. He is never separated
+from his "box," and the recognized uniform of a Kroo boy at work, is
+his breechcloth, and hanging from a ribbon around his knee, the key
+to his box. If a boy has no box he generally carries three keys.
+
+In the first-class car were three French officers en route to
+Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo, and a dog, a sad
+mongrel, very dirty, very hungry. On each side of the tiny toy car
+were six revolving-chairs, so the four men, not to speak of the dog,
+quite filled it. And to our own bulk each added hand-bags, cases of
+beer, helmets, gun-cases, cameras, water-bottles, and, as the road
+does not supply food of any kind, his chop-box. A chop-box is
+anything that holds food, and for food of every kind, for the hours
+of feeding, and the verb "to feed," on the West Coast, the only
+word, the "lazy" word, is "chop."
+
+The absent-minded young missionary, with Fanny jammed between his
+ankles, and looking out miserably upon the world, and two other
+young missionaries, travelled second-class.
+
+They were even more crowded together than were we, but not so much
+with luggage as with humanity. But as a protest against the high
+charges of the railroad the missionaries always travel in the open
+car. These three young men were for the first time out of England,
+and in any fashion were glad to start on their long journey up the
+Congo to Bolobo. To them whatever happened was a joke. It was a joke
+even when the colored "wife" of one of the French officers used the
+broad shoulders of one of them as a pillow and slept sweetly. She
+was a large, good-natured, good-looking mulatto, and at the frequent
+stations the French officer ran back to her with "white man's chop,"
+a tin of sausages, a pineapple, a bottle of beer. She drank the
+beer from the bottle, and with religious tolerance offered it to the
+Baptists. They assured her without the least regret that they were
+teetotalers. To the other blacks in the open car the sight of a
+white man waiting on one of their own people was a thrilling
+spectacle. They regarded the woman who could command such services
+with respect. It would be interesting to know what they thought of
+the white man. At each station the open car disgorged its occupants
+to fill with water the beer bottle each carried, and to buy from the
+natives kwango, the black man's bread, a flaky, sticky flour that
+tastes like boiled chestnuts; and pineapples at a franc for ten. And
+such pineapples! Not hard and rubber-like, as we know them at home,
+but delicious, juicy, melting in the mouth like hothouse grapes,
+and, also, after each mouthful, making a complete bath necessary.
+One of the French officers had a lump of ice which he broke into
+pieces and divided with the others. They saluted magnificently many
+times, and as each drowned the morsel in his tin cup of beer, one of
+them cried with perfect simplicity: "C'est Paris!" This reminded me
+that the ship's steward had placed much ice in my chop basket, and I
+carried some of it to another car in which were five of the White
+Sisters. For nineteen days I had been with them on the steamer, but
+they had spoken to no one, and I was doubtful how they would accept
+my offering. But the Mother Superior gave permission, and they took
+the ice through the car window, their white hoods bristling with the
+excitement of the adventure. They were on their way to a post still
+two months' journey up the river, nearly to Lake Tanganyika, and for
+three years or, possibly, until they died, that was the last ice
+they would see.
+
+At Bongolo station the division superintendent came in the car and
+everybody offered him refreshment, and in return he told us, in the
+hope of interesting us, of a washout, and then casually mentioned
+that an hour before an elephant had blocked the track. It seemed so
+much too good to be true that I may have expressed some doubt, for
+he said: "Why, of course and certainly. Already this morning one was
+at Sariski Station and another at Sipeto." And instead of looking
+out of the window I had been reading an American magazine, filched
+from the smoking-room, which was one year old!
+
+At Thysville the railroad may have opened a hotel, but when I was
+there to hunt for a night's shelter it turned you out bag and
+baggage. The French officers decided to risk a Portuguese trading
+store known as the "Ideal Hotel," and the missionaries very kindly
+gave me the freedom of their Rest House. It is kept open for
+those of the Mission who pass between the Upper and Lower Congo.
+At the station the young missionaries were met by two older
+missionaries--Mr. Weekes, who furnished the "Commission of Enquiry"
+with much evidence, which they would not, or were not allowed to,
+print, and Mr. Jennings. With them were twenty "boys" from the
+Mission and, with each of them carrying a piece of our baggage on
+his head, we climbed the hill, and I was given a clean, comfortable,
+completely appointed bedroom. Our combined chop we turned over to a
+black brother. He is the custodian of the Rest House and an
+excellent cook. While he was preparing it my boys spread out my
+folding rubber tub. Had I closed the door I should have smothered,
+so, in the presence of twenty interested black Baptists, I took an
+embarrassing but one of the most necessary baths I can remember.
+
+There still was a piece of the ice remaining, and as the interest in
+the bathtub had begun to drag I handed it to one of my audience. He
+yelled as though I had thrust into his hand a drop of vitriol, and,
+leaping in the air, threw the ice on the floor and dared any one to
+touch it. From the "personal" boys who had travelled to Matadi the
+Mission boys had heard of ice. But none had ever seen it. They
+approached it as we would a rattlesnake. Each touched it and then
+sprang away. Finally one, his eyes starting from his head,
+cautiously stroked the inoffensive brick and then licked his
+fingers. The effect was instantaneous. He assured the others it was
+"good chop," and each of them sat hunched about it on his heels,
+stroking it, and licking his fingers, and then with delighted
+thrills rubbing them over his naked body. The little block of ice
+that at Liverpool was only a "quart of water" had assumed the value
+of a diamond.
+
+Dinner was enlivened by an incident. Mr. Weekes, with orders simply
+to "fry these," had given to the assistant of the cook two tins of
+sausages. The small _chef_ presented them to us in the pan in which
+he had cooked them, but he had obeyed instructions to the letter and
+had fried the tins unopened.
+
+After dinner we sat until late, while the older men told the young
+missionaries of atrocities of which, in the twenty years and within
+the last three years, they had been witnesses. Already in Mr.
+Morel's books I had read their testimony, but hearing from the men
+themselves the tales of outrage and cruelty gave them a fresh and
+more intimate value, and sent me to bed hot and sick with
+indignation. But, nevertheless, the night I slept at Thysville was
+the only cool one I knew in the Congo. It was as cool as is a night
+in autumn at home. Thysville, between the Upper and the Lower Congo,
+with its fresh mountain air, is an obvious site for a hospital for
+the servants of the State. To the Congo it should be what Simla is
+to the sick men of India; but the State is not running hospitals. It
+is in the rubber business.
+
+All steamers for the Upper Congo and her great tributaries, whether
+they belong to the State or the Missions, start from Leopoldville.
+There they fit out for voyages, some of which last three and four
+months. So it is a place of importance, but, like Boma, it looks as
+though the people who yesterday built it meant to-morrow to move
+out. The river-front is one long dump-heap. It is a grave-yard for
+rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars. The interior of the
+principal storehouse for ships' supplies, directly in front of the
+office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old
+iron and newspapers. I should have enjoyed taking the captain of the
+port by the neck and showing him the water-front and marine shops at
+Calabar; the wharfs and quays of stone, the open places spread with
+gravel, the whitewashed cement gutters, the spare parts of
+machinery, greased and labeled in their proper shelves, even the
+condemned scrap-iron in orderly piles; the whole yard as trim as a
+battleship.
+
+On the river-front at Leopoldville a grossly fat man, collarless,
+coatless, purple-faced, perspiring, was rushing up and down. He was
+the captain of the port. Black women had assembled to greet
+returning black soldiers, and the captain was calling upon the black
+sentries to drive them away. The sentries, yelling, fell upon the
+women with their six-foot staves and beat them over the head and
+bare shoulders, and as they fled, screaming, the captain of the port
+danced in the sun shaking his fists after them and raging violently.
+Next morning I was told he had tried to calm his nerves with
+absinthe, which is not particularly good for nerves, and was
+exceedingly unwell. I was sorry for him. The picture of discipline
+afforded by the glazed-eyed official, reeling and cursing in the
+open street, had been illuminating.
+
+Although at Leopoldville the State has failed to build wharfs, the
+esthetic features of the town have not been neglected, and there is
+a pretty plaza called Stanley Park. In the centre of this plaza is a
+pillar with, at its base, a bust of Leopold, and on the top of the
+pillar a plaster-of-Paris lady, nude, and, not unlike the
+Bacchante of MacMonnies. Not so much from the likeness as from
+history, I deduced that the lady must be Cléo de Mérode. But whether
+the monument is erected to her or to Leopold, or to both of them, I
+do not know.
+
+ [Illustration: The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+ Stanley, but to Leopold.]
+
+I left Leopoldville in the _Deliverance_. Some of the State boats
+that make the long trip to Stanleyville are very large ships. They
+have plenty of deck room and many cabins. With their flat, raft-like
+hull, their paddle-wheel astern, and the covered sun deck, they
+resemble gigantic house-boats. Of one of these boats the
+_Deliverance_ was only one-third the size, but I took passage on her
+because she would give me a chance to see not only something of the
+Congo, but also one of its great tributaries, the less travelled
+Kasai. The _Deliverance_ was about sixty-five feet over all and drew
+three feet of water. She was built like a mud-scow, with a deck of
+iron plates. Amidships, on this deck, was a tiny cabin with berths
+for two passengers and standing room for one. The furnaces and
+boiler were forward, banked by piles of wood. All the river boats
+burn only wood. Her engines were in the stern. These engines and the
+driving-rod to the paddle-wheel were uncovered. This gives the
+_Deliverance_ the look of a large automobile without a tonneau. You
+were constantly wondering what had gone wrong with the carbureter,
+and if it rained what would happen to her engines. Supported on iron
+posts was an upper deck, on which, forward, stood the captain's box
+of a cabin and directly in front of it the steering-wheel. The
+telegraph, which signalled to the openwork engine below, and a
+dining table as small as a chess-board, completely filled the
+"bridge." When we sat at table the captain's boy could only just
+squeeze himself between us and the rail. It was like dining in a
+private box. And certainly no theatre ever offered such scenery, nor
+did any menagerie ever present so many strange animals.
+
+We were four white men: Captain Jensen, his engineer, and the other
+passenger, Captain Anfossi, a young Italian. Before he reached his
+post he had to travel one month on the _Deliverance_ and for another
+month walk through the jungle. He was the most cheerful and amusing
+companion, and had he been returning after three years of exile to
+his home he could not have been more brimful of spirits. Captain
+Jensen was a Dane (almost every river captain is a Swede or a Dane)
+and talked a little English, a little French, and a little Bangala.
+The mechanician was a Finn and talked the native Bangala, and
+Anfossi spoke French. After chop, when we were all assembled on the
+upper deck, there would be the most extraordinary talks in four
+languages, or we would appoint one man to act as a clearing-house,
+and he would translate for the others.
+
+On the lower deck we carried twenty "wood boys," whose duty was to
+cut wood for the furnace, and about thirty black passengers. They
+were chiefly soldiers, who had finished their period of service for
+the State, with their wives and children. They were crowded on the
+top of the hatches into a space fifteen by fifteen feet between our
+cabin door and the furnace. Around the combings of the hatches, and
+where the scuppers would have been had the _Deliverance_ had
+scuppers, the river raced over the deck to a depth of four or five
+inches. When the passengers wanted to wash their few clothes or
+themselves they carried on their ablutions and laundry work where
+they happened to be sitting. But for Anfossi and myself to go from
+our cabin to the iron ladder of the bridge it was necessary to wade
+both in the water and to make stepping stones of the passengers. I
+do not mean that we merely stepped over an occasional arm or leg. I
+mean we walked on them. You have seen a football player, in a hurry
+to make a touchdown, hurdle without prejudice both friends and foes.
+Our progress was like this. But by practice we became so expert that
+without even awakening them we could spring lightly from the plump
+stomach of a black baby to its mother's shoulder, from there leap to
+the father's ribs, and rebound upon the rungs of the ladder.
+
+ [Illustration: The _Deliverance_.]
+
+The river marched to the sea at the rate of four to five miles an
+hour. The _Deliverance_ could make about nine knots an hour, so we
+travelled at the average rate of five miles; but for the greater
+part of each day we were tied to a bank while the boys went ashore
+and cut enough wood to carry us farther. And we never travelled at
+night. Owing to the changing currents, before the sun set we ran
+into shore and made fast to a tree. I explained how in America the
+river boats used search-lights, and was told that on one boat the
+State had experimented with a searchlight, but that particular
+searchlight having got out of order the idea of night travelling was
+condemned.
+
+Ours was a most lazy progress, but one with the most beautiful
+surroundings and filled with entertainment. From our private box we
+looked out upon the most wonderful of panoramas. Sometimes we were
+closely hemmed in by mountains of light-green grass, except where,
+in the hollows, streams tumbled in tiny waterfalls between gigantic
+trees hung with strange flowering vines and orchids. Or we would
+push into great lakes of swirling brown water, dotted with flat
+islands overgrown with reed grass higher than the head of a man.
+Again the water turned blue and the trees on the banks grew into
+forests with the look of cultivated, well-cared-for parks, but with
+no sign of man, not even a mud hut or a canoe; only the strangest of
+birds and the great river beasts. Sometimes the sky was overcast and
+gray, the warm rain shut us in like a fog, and the clouds hid the
+peaks of the hills, or there would come a swift black tornado and
+the rain beat into our private box, and each would sit crouched in
+his rain coat, while the engineer smothered his driving-rods in palm
+oil, and the great drops drummed down upon the awning and drowned
+the fire in our pipes. After these storms, as though it were being
+pushed up from below, the river seemed to rise in the centre, to
+become convex. By some optical illusion, it seemed to fall away on
+either hand to the depth of three or four feet.
+
+But as a rule we had a brilliant, gorgeous sunshine that made the
+eddying waters flash and sparkle, and caused the banks of sand to
+glare like whitewashed walls, and turn the sharp, hard fronds of the
+palms into glittering sword-blades. The movement of the boat
+tempered the heat, and in lazy content we sat in our lookout box and
+smiled upon the world. Except for the throb of the engine and the
+slow splash, splash, splash of the wheel there was no sound. We
+might have been adrift in the heart of a great ocean. So complete
+was the silence, so few were the sounds of man's presence, that at
+times one almost thought that ours was the first boat to disturb the
+Congo.
+
+Although we were travelling by boat, we spent as much time on land
+as on the water. Because the _Deliverance_ burnt wood and, like an
+invading army, "lived on the country," she was always stopping to
+lay in a supply. That gave Anfossi and myself a chance to visit the
+native villages or to hunt in the forest.
+
+To feed her steamers the State has established along the river-bank
+posts for wood, and in theory at these places there always is a
+sufficient supply of wood to carry a steamer to the next post. But
+our experience was either that another steamer had just taken all
+the wood or that the boys had decided to work no more and had hidden
+themselves in the bush. The State posts were "clearings," less than
+one hundred yards square, cut out of the jungle. Sometimes only
+black men were in charge, but as a rule the _chef de poste_ was a
+lonely, fever-ridden white, whose only interest in our arrival was
+his hope that we might spare him quinine. I think we gave away as
+many grains of quinine as we received logs of wood. Empty-handed we
+would turn from the wood post and steam a mile or so farther up the
+river, where we would run into a bank, and a boy with a steel hawser
+would leap overboard and tie up the boat to the roots of a tree.
+Then all the boys would disappear into the jungle and attack the
+primeval forest. Each was supplied with a machete and was expected
+to furnish a _bras_ of wood. A _bras_ is a number of sticks about as
+long and as thick as your arm, placed in a pile about three feet
+high and about three feet wide. To fix this measure the head boy
+drove poles into the bank three feet apart, and from pole to pole at
+the same distance from the ground stretched a strip of bark. When
+each boy had filled one of these openings all the wood was carried
+on board, and we would unhitch the _Deliverance_, and she would
+proceed to burn up the fuel we had just collected. It took the
+twenty boys about four hours to cut the wood, and the _Deliverance_
+the same amount of time to burn it. It was distinctly a
+hand-to-mouth existence. As I have pointed out, when it is too dark
+to see the currents, the Congo captains never attempt to travel. So
+each night at sunset Captain Jensen ran into the bank, and as soon
+as the plank was out all the black passengers and the crew passed
+down it and spent the night on shore. In five minutes the women
+would have the fires lighted and the men would be cutting grass
+for bedding and running up little shelters of palm boughs and
+hanging up linen strips that were both tents and mosquito nets.
+
+ [Illustration: The Native Wife of a _Chef de Poste_.]
+
+In the moonlight the natives with their camp-fires and torches made
+most wonderful pictures. Sometimes for their sleeping place the
+captain would select a glade in the jungle, or where a stream had
+cut a little opening in the forest, or a sandy island, with tall
+rushes on either side and the hot African moon shining on the white
+sand and turning the palms to silver, or they would pitch camp in a
+buffalo wallow, where the grass and mud had been trampled into a
+clay floor by the hoofs of hundreds of wild animals. But the fact
+that they were to sleep where at sunrise and at sunset came
+buffaloes, elephants, and panthers, disturbed the women not at all,
+and as they bent, laughing, over the iron pots, the firelight shone
+on their bare shoulders and was reflected from their white teeth and
+rolling eyes and brazen bangles.
+
+Until late in the night the goats would bleat, babies cry, and the
+"boys" and "mammies" talked, sang, quarrelled, beat tom-toms, and
+squeezed mournful groans out of the accordion of civilization. One
+would have thought we had anchored off a busy village rather than at
+a place where, before that night, the inhabitants had been only the
+beasts of the jungle and the river.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+AMERICANS IN THE CONGO
+
+
+In trying to sum up what I found in the Congo Free State, I think
+what one fails to find there is of the greatest significance. To
+tell what the place is like, you must tell what it lacks. One must
+write of the Congo always in the negative. It is as though you
+asked: "What sort of a house is this one Jones has built?" and were
+answered: "Well, it hasn't any roof, and it hasn't any cellar, and
+it has no windows, floors, or chimneys. It's that kind of a house."
+
+When first I arrived in the Congo the time I could spend there
+seemed hopelessly inadequate. After I'd been there a month, it
+seemed to me that in a very few days any one could obtain a
+painfully correct idea of the place, and of the way it is
+administered. If an orchestra starts on an piece of music with all
+the instruments out of tune, it need not play through the entire
+number for you to know that the instruments are out of tune.
+
+The charges brought against Leopold II, as King of the Congo, are
+three:
+
+(_a_) That he has made slaves of the twenty million blacks he
+promised to protect.
+
+(_b_) That, in spite of his promise to keep the Congo open to trade,
+he has closed it to all nations.
+
+(_c_) That the revenues of the country and all of its trade he has
+retained for himself.
+
+Any one who visits the Congo and remains only two weeks will be
+convinced that of these charges Leopold is guilty. In that time he
+will not see atrocities, but he will see that the natives are
+slaves, that no foreigner can trade with them, that in the interest
+of Leopold alone the country is milked.
+
+He will see that the government of Leopold is not a government. It
+preserves the perquisites and outward signs of government. It coins
+money, issues stamps, collects taxes. But it assumes none of the
+responsibilities of government. The Congo Free State is only a great
+trading house. And in it Leopold is the only wholesale and retail
+trader. He gives a bar of soap for rubber, and makes a "turn-over"
+of a cup of salt for ivory. He is not a monarch. He is a shopkeeper.
+
+And were the country not so rich in rubber and ivory, were the
+natives not sweated so severely, he also would be a bankrupt
+shopkeeper. For the Congo is not only one vast trading post, but
+also it is a trading post badly managed. Even in the republics of
+Central America where the government changes so frequently, and
+where each new president is trying to make hay while he can, there
+is better administration, more is done for the people, the rights of
+other nations are better respected.
+
+Were the Congo properly managed, it would be one of the richest
+territories on the surface of the earth. As it is, through ignorance
+and cupidity, it is being despoiled and its people are the most
+wretched of human beings. In the White Book containing the reports
+of British vice-consuls on conditions in the Congo from April of
+last year to January of this year, Mr. Mitchell tells how the
+enslavement of the people still continues, how "they" (the
+conscripts, as they are called) "are hunted in the forest by
+soldiers, and brought in chained by the neck like criminals." They
+then, though conscripted to serve in the army, are set to manual
+labor. They are slaves. The difference between the slavery under
+Leopold and the slavery under the Arab raiders is that the Arab was
+the better and kinder master. He took "prisoners" just as Leopold
+seizes "conscripts," but he had too much foresight to destroy whole
+villages, to carry off all the black man's live stock, and to uproot
+his vegetable gardens. He purposed to return. And he did not wish to
+so terrify the blacks that to escape from him they would penetrate
+farther into the jungle. His motive was purely selfish, but his
+methods, compared with those of Leopold, were almost considerate.
+The work the State to-day requires of the blacks is so oppressive
+that they have no time, no heart, to labor for themselves.
+
+In every other colony--French, English, German--in the native
+villages I saw vegetable gardens, goats, and chickens, large,
+comfortable, three-room huts, fences, and, especially in the German
+settlement of the Cameroons at Duala, many flower gardens. In Bell
+Town at Duala I walked for miles through streets lined with such
+huts and gardens, and saw whole families, the very old as well as
+the very young, sitting contentedly in the shade of their trees, or
+at work in their gardens. In the Congo native villages I saw but one
+old person, of chickens or goats that were not to be given to the
+government as taxes I saw none, and the vegetable gardens, when
+there were any such, were cultivated for the benefit of the _chef de
+poste_, and the huts were small, temporary, and filthy. The dogs in
+the kennels on my farm are better housed, better fed, and much
+better cared for, whether ill or well, than are the twenty millions
+of blacks along the Congo River. And that these human beings are so
+ill-treated is due absolutely to the cupidity of one man, and to the
+apathy of the rest of the world. And it is due as much to the apathy
+and indifference of whoever may read this as to the silence of Elihu
+Root or Sir Edward Grey. No one can shirk his responsibility by
+sneering, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The Government of the United
+States and the thirteen other countries have promised to protect
+these people, to care for their "material and moral welfare," and
+that promise is morally binding upon the people of those countries.
+How much Leopold cares for the material welfare of the natives is
+illustrated by the prices he pays the "boys" who worked on the
+government steamer in which I went up the Kasai. They were bound on
+a three months' voyage, and for each month's work on this trip they
+were given in payment their rice and eighty cents. That is, at the
+end of the trip they received what in our money would be equivalent
+to two dollars and forty cents. And that they did not receive in
+money, but in "trade goods," which are worth about ten per cent less
+than their money value. So that of the two dollars and eighty cents
+that is due them, these black boys, who for three months sweated in
+the dark jungle cutting wood, are robbed by this King of twenty-four
+cents. One would dislike to grow rich at that price.
+
+ [Illustration: English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges.]
+
+In the French Congo I asked the traders at Libreville what they paid
+their boys for cutting mahogany. I found the price was four francs a
+day without "chop," or three and a half francs with "chop." That
+is, on one side of the river the French pay in cash for one day's
+work what Leopold pays in trade goods for the work of a month. As a
+result the natives run away to the French side, and often, I might
+almost say invariably, when at the _poste de bois_ on the Congo side
+we would find two cords of wood, on the other bank at the post for
+the French boats we would count two hundred and fifty cords of wood.
+I took photographs of the native villages in all the colonies, in
+order to show how they compared--of the French and Belgian wood
+posts, the one well stocked and with the boys lying about asleep or
+playing musical instruments, or alert to trade and barter, and on
+the Belgian side no wood, and the unhappy white man alone, and
+generally shivering with fever. Had the photographs only developed
+properly they would have shown much more convincingly than one can
+write how utterly miserable is the condition of the Congo negro. And
+the condition of the white man at the wood posts is only a little
+better. We found one man absolutely without supplies. He was only
+twenty-four hours distant from Leopoldville, but no supplies had
+been sent him. He was ill with fever, and he could eat nothing but
+milk. Captain Jensen had six cans of condensed milk, which the State
+calculated should suffice for him and his passengers for three
+months. He turned the lot over to the sick man.
+
+We found another white man at the first wood post on the Kasai just
+above where it meets the Congo. He was in bed and dangerously ill
+with enteric fever. He had telegraphed the State at Leopoldville and
+a box of medicines had been sent to him; but the State doctors had
+forgotten to enclose any directions for their use. We were as
+ignorant of medicines as the man himself, and, as it was impossible
+to move him, we were forced to leave him lying in his cot with the
+row of bottles and tiny boxes, that might have given him life,
+unopened at his elbow. It was ten days before the next boat would
+touch at his post. I do not know that it reached him in time. One
+could tell dozens of such stories of cruelty to natives and of
+injustice and neglect to the white agents.
+
+The fact that Leopold has granted to American syndicates control
+over two great territories in the Congo may bring about a better
+state of affairs, and, in any event, it may arouse public interest
+in this country. It certainly should be of interest to Americans
+that some of the most prominent of their countrymen have gone into
+close partnership with a speculator as unscrupulous and as notorious
+as is Leopold, and that they are to exploit a country which as yet
+has been developed only by the help of slavery, with all its
+attendant evils of cruelty and torture.
+
+That Leopold has no right to give these concessions is a matter
+which chiefly concerns the men who are to pay for them, but it is an
+interesting fact.
+
+The Act of Berlin expressly states: _"No Power which exercises, or
+shall exercise, sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions,
+shall be allowed to grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in
+matters of trade."_
+
+Leopold is only a steward placed by the Powers over the Congo. He is
+a janitor. And he has no more authority to give even a foot of
+territory to Belgians, Americans, or Chinamen than the janitor of an
+apartment house has authority to fill the rooms with his wife's
+relations or sell the coal in the basement.
+
+The charge that the present concessionaires have no title that any
+independent trader or miner need respect is one that is sure to be
+brought up when the Powers throw Leopold out, and begin to clean
+house. The concessionaires take a sporting chance that Leopold will
+not be thrown out. It should be remembered that it is to his and to
+their advantage to see that he is not.
+
+In November of 1906, Leopold gave the International Forestry and
+Mining Company of the Congo mining rights in territories adjoining
+his private park, the _Domaine de la Couronne_, and to the American
+Congo Company he granted the right to work rubber along the Congo
+River to where it joins the Kasai. This latter is a territory of
+four thousand square miles. The company also has the option within
+the next eleven years of buying land in any part of a district which
+is nearly one-half of the entire Congo. Of the Forestry and Mining
+Company one-half of the profits go to Leopold, one-fourth to
+Belgians, and the remaining fourth to the Americans. Of the profits
+of the American Congo Company, Leopold is entitled to one-half and
+the Americans to the other half. This company was one originally
+organized to exploit a new method of manufacturing crude rubber from
+the plant. The company was taken over by Thomas F. Ryan and his
+associates. Back of both companies are the Guggenheims, who are to
+perform the actual work in the mines and in the rubber plantation.
+Early in March a large number of miners and engineers were selected
+by John Hays Hammond, the chief engineer of the Guggenheim
+Exploration Companies, and A. Chester Beatty, and were sent to
+explore the territory granted in the mining concession. Another
+force of experts are soon to follow. The legal representative of the
+syndicates has stated that in the Congo they intend to move "on
+commercial lines." By that we take it they mean they will give the
+native a proper price for his labor; and instead of offering
+"bonuses" and "commissions" to their white employees will pay them
+living wages. The exact terms of the concessions are wrapped in
+mystery. Some say the territories ceded to the concessionaires are
+to be governed by them, policed by them, and that within the
+boundaries of these concessions the Americans are to have absolute
+control. If this be so the syndicates are entering upon an
+experiment which for Americans is almost without precedent. They
+will be virtually what in England is called a chartered company,
+with the difference that the Englishmen receive their charter from
+their own government, while the charter under which the Americans
+will act will be granted by a foreign Power, and for what they may
+do in the Congo their own government could not hold them
+responsible. They are answerable only to the Power that issued the
+charter; and that Power is the just, the humane, the merciful
+Leopold.
+
+The history of the early days of chartered companies in Africa,
+notoriously those of the Congo, Northern Nigeria, Rhodesia, and
+German Central Africa does not make pleasant reading. But until the
+Americans in the Congo have made this experiment, it would be most
+unfair (except that the company they choose to keep leaves them open
+to suspicion) not to give them the benefit of the doubt. One can at
+least say for them that they seem to be absolutely ignorant of the
+difficulties that lie before them. At least that is true of all of
+them to whom I have talked.
+
+The attorney of the Rubber Company when interviewed by a
+representative of a New York paper is reported to have said: "We
+have purchased a privilege from a Sovereign State and propose to
+operate it along purely commercial lines. With King Leopold's
+management of Congo affairs in the past, or, with _what he may do in
+an administrative way in the future, we have absolutely nothing to
+do_." The italics are mine.
+
+When asked: "Under your concessions are you given similar powers
+over the native blacks as are enjoyed by other concessionaires?" the
+answer of the attorney, as reported, was: "The problem of labor is
+not mentioned in the concession agreement, neither is the question
+of local administration. We are left to solve the labor problem in
+our own way, on a purely commercial basis, and with the question of
+government we have absolutely nothing whatever to do. The labor
+problem will not be formidable. Our mills are simple affairs. One
+man can manage them, and the question of the labor on the rubber
+concession is reduced to the minimum." This answer of the learned
+attorney shows an ignorance of "labor" conditions in the Congo which
+is, unless assumed, absolutely abject.
+
+If the American syndicates are not to police and govern the
+territories ceded them, but if these territories are to continue to
+be administered by Leopold, it is not possible for the Americans to
+have "absolutely nothing to do" with that administration. Leopold's
+sole idea of administration is that every black man is his slave, in
+other words, the only men the Americans can depend upon for labor
+are slaves. Of the profits of these American companies Leopold is to
+receive one-half. He will work his rubber with slaves.
+
+Are the Americans going to use slaves also, or do they intend "on
+commercial lines" to pay those who work for them living wages? And
+if they do, at the end of the fiscal year, having paid a fair price
+for labor, are they prepared to accept a smaller profit than will
+their partner Leopold, who obtains his labor with the aid of a chain
+and a whip?
+
+ [Illustration: The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+ Concessionaires Must Depend.]
+
+The attorney for the company airily says: "The labor problem will
+not be formidable."
+
+If the man knows what he is talking about, he can mean but one
+thing.
+
+The motives that led Leopold to grant these concessions are possibly
+various. The motives that induced the Americans to take his offer
+were probably less complicated. With them it was no question of
+politics. They wanted the money; they did not need it, for they all
+are rich--they merely wanted it. But Leopold wants more than the
+half profits he will obtain from the Americans. If the Powers should
+wake from their apathy and try to cast him out of the Congo, he
+wants, through his American partners, the help of the United States.
+Should he be "dethroned," by granting these concessions now on a
+share and share alike basis with Belgians, French, and Americans, he
+still, through them, hopes to draw from the Congo a fair income. And
+in the meanwhile he looks to these Americans to kill any action
+against him that may be taken in our Senate and House of
+Representatives, even in the White House and Department of State.
+
+For the last two years Chester A. Beatty has been visiting Leopold
+at Belgium, and has obtained the two concessions, and Leopold has
+obtained, or hopes he has obtained, the influence of many American
+shareholders. The fact that the people of the United States
+possessed no "vested interest" in the Congo was the important fact
+that placed any action on our part in behalf of that distressed
+country above suspicion. If we acted, we did so because the United
+States, as one of the signatory Powers of the Berlin Act, had
+promised to protect the natives of the Congo; and we could truly
+claim that we acted only in the name of humanity. Leopold has now
+robbed us of that claim. He hopes that the enormous power wielded by
+the Americans with whom he is associated, will prevent any action
+against him in this country.
+
+But the deal has already been made public, and the motives of those
+who now oppose improvement of conditions in the Congo, and who
+support Leopold, will be at once suspected.
+
+To me the most interesting thing about the tract of land ceded to
+Mr. Ryan, apart from the number of hippopotamuses I saw on it, was
+that the people living along the Congo say that it is of no value.
+They told me that two years ago, after working it for some time,
+Leopold abandoned it as unprofitable, and they added that, when
+Leopold cannot whip rubber out of the forest, it is hard to believe
+that it can be obtained there legitimately by any one else. On the
+bank I saw the "factories" to which the unprofitable rubber had been
+carried from the interior. They had formerly belonged to Leopold,
+now they are the property of Mr. Ryan and of the American Congo
+Company. In only two years they already are in ruins, and the jungle
+has engulfed them.
+
+I was on the land owned by the company a dozen times or more, but I
+did not go into the interior. Even had I done so, I am not an expert
+on rubber, and would have understood nothing of Para trees, Lagos
+silk, and liane. I am speaking not of my own knowledge, only of what
+was told me by people who live on the spot. I found that this
+particular concession was well known, because, unlike the land given
+to the Forestry and Mines Company, it is not an inaccessible tract,
+but is situated only eight miles from Leopoldville. In our language,
+that is about as far as is the Battery to 160th Street. Leopoldville
+is the chief place on the Congo River, and every one there who spoke
+to me of the concession knew where it was situated, and repeated
+that it had been given up by Leopold as unprofitable, and that he
+had unloaded it on Mr. Ryan. They seem to think it very clever of
+the King to have got rid of it to the American millionaire. To one
+knowing Mr. Ryan only from what he reads of him in the public press,
+he does not seem to be the sort of man to whom Leopold could sell a
+worthless rubber plantation. However, it is a matter which concerns
+only Mr. Ryan and those who may think of purchasing shares in the
+company. The Guggenheims, who are to operate this rubber, say that
+Leopold did not know how to get out the full value of the land, and
+that they, by using the machinery they will install, will be able to
+make a profit, where Leopold, using only native labor, suffered a
+loss.
+
+To the poor the ways of the truly rich are past finding out. After a
+man has attained a fortune sufficient to keep him in yachts and
+automobiles, one would think he could afford to indulge himself in
+the luxury of being squeamish; that as to where he obtained any
+further increase of wealth, he would prefer to pick and choose.
+
+On the contrary, these Americans go as far out of their way as
+Belgium to make a partner of the man who has wrung his money from
+wretched slaves, who were beaten, starved, and driven in chains.
+This concession cannot make them rich. It can only make them richer.
+And not richer in fact, for all the money they may whip out of the
+Congo could not give them one thing that they cannot now command,
+not an extra taste to the lips, not a fresh sensation, not one added
+power for good. To them it can mean only a figure in ink on a page
+of a bank-book. But what suffering, what misery it may mean to the
+slaves who put it there! Why should men as rich as these elect to go
+into partnership with one who sweats his dollars out of the naked
+black? How really fine, how really wonderful it would be if these
+same men, working together, decided to set free these twenty million
+people--if, instead of joining hands with Leopold, they would
+overthrow him and march into the Congo free men, without his chain
+around their ankles, and open it to the trade of the world, and give
+justice and a right to live and to work and to sell and buy to
+millions of miserable human beings. These Americans working together
+could do it. They could do it from Washington. Or five hundred men
+with two Maxim guns could do it. The "kingdom" of the Congo is only
+a house of cards. Five hundred filibusters could take Boma, proclaim
+the Congo open to the traders of the world, as the Act of Berlin
+declares it to be, and in a day make of Leopold the jest of Europe.
+They would only be taking possession of what has always belonged to
+them.
+
+Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
+They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty,
+or crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven
+by any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
+degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
+risking life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows,
+and for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great.
+They had the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity.
+One of them picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the
+wrist of his tunic, and said: "Look, it is our badge of shame."
+
+To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
+home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men
+and brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will,
+safe in their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard
+King.
+
+What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
+Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
+possible, a greater evil?
+
+E.R. Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the
+improvement of the Congo, has written: "It is a little difficult to
+imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of
+Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in
+slave-driving. The trouble is that they probably know nothing about
+African conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his
+detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis
+that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere
+'laborers' for the white man's benefit, possessing no rights in land
+nor in the produce of the soil. If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are
+going to acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by
+'commercial methods,' we welcome their advent. But we would point
+out to them that, in such a case, they had better at once abandon
+all idea of three or four hundred per cent dividends with which the
+wily autocrat at Brussels has doubtless primed them. No such
+monstrous profits are to be acquired in tropical Africa under a
+trade system. If, on the other hand, the methods they are prepared
+to adopt are the methods King Leopold and his other concessionaires
+have adopted for the past thirteen years, devastation and
+destruction, and the raising of more large bodies of soldiers, are
+their essential accompaniments; and the widening of the area of the
+Congo hell is assured."
+
+The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise
+good to that unhappy country are that our country is represented at
+Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the
+person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual
+work of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the
+Guggenheims. They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as
+philanthropists and humanitarians of the common-sense type. Like
+other rich men of their race, they have given largely to charity and
+to assist those less fortunate than themselves.
+
+For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they
+have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it
+successfully. Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with
+fairness.
+
+"Why should you suppose," Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, "that in
+the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly? In Mexico we found the
+natives ill-paid and ill-fed. We fed them and paid them well. Not
+from any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business. It is
+not good business to cut off a workman's hands or head. We are not
+ashamed of the way we have always treated our workmen, and in the
+Congo we are not going to spoil our record."
+
+I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold,
+tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway
+to his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his
+agents might do there he could not possibly know. To this Mr.
+Guggenheim answered that "Neither Leopold nor anyone else can
+dictate how we shall treat the native labor," that if his agents
+were cruel they would be instantly dismissed, and that for what
+occurred in the Congo on the land occupied by the American Congo
+Company his brothers and himself alone were responsible, and that
+they accepted that responsibility.
+
+But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him
+into trouble, men of whose _dossiers_ he is quite ignorant.
+
+From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several
+of his "valets du roi," press agents, and tools, men who for years
+have been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the
+Americans, one, who is prominently exploited by the Belgians, had
+to leave Africa for theft.
+
+That Mr. Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the
+Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt. But that on
+Broadway, removed from the scene of operations in time some four to
+six months, and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can
+control the acts of his agents and his partners, remains to be
+proved. He is attacking a problem much more momentous than the
+handling of Mexican _peons_ or Chinese coolies, and every step of
+the working out of this problem will be watched by the people of
+this country.
+
+And should they find that the example of the Belgian concessionaires
+in their treatment of the natives is being imitated by even one of
+the American Congo Company the people of this country will know it,
+and may the Lord have mercy on his soul!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+HUNTING THE HIPPO
+
+
+Except once or twice in the Zoo, I never had seen a hippopotamus,
+and I was most anxious, before I left the Congo, to meet one. I
+wanted to look at him when he was free, and his own master, without
+iron bars or keepers; when he believed he was quite alone, and was
+enjoying his bath in peace and confidence. I also wanted to shoot
+him, and to hang in my ancestral halls his enormous head with the
+great jaws open and the inside of them painted pink and the small
+tusks hungrily protruding. I had this desire, in spite of the fact
+that for every hippo except the particular one whose head I coveted,
+I entertained the utmost good feeling.
+
+As a lad, among other beasts the hippopotamus had appealed to my
+imagination. Collectively, I had always looked upon them as most
+charming people. They come of an ancient family. Two thousand four
+hundred years ago they were mentioned by Herodotus. And Herodotus to
+the animal kingdom is what Domesday Book is to the landed gentry. To
+exist beautifully for twenty-four hundred years without a single
+mésalliance, without having once stooped to trade, is certainly a
+strong title to nobility. Other animals by contact with man have
+become degraded. The lion, the "King of Beasts," now rides a
+bicycle, and growls, as previously rehearsed, at the young woman in
+spangles, of whom he is secretly afraid. And the elephant, the
+monarch of the jungle, and of a family as ancient and noble as that
+of the hippopotamus, the monarch of the river, has become a beast of
+burden and works for his living. You can see him in Phoenix Park
+dragging a road-roller, in Siam and India carrying logs, and at
+Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn. The
+royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.
+
+But, you never see a hippopotamus chained to a road-roller, or
+riding a bicycle. He is still the gentleman, the man of elegant
+leisure, the aristocrat of aristocrats, harming no one, and, in his
+ancestral river, living the simple life.
+
+And yet, I sought to kill him. At least, one of him, but only one.
+And, that I did not kill even one, while a bitter disappointment, is
+still a source of satisfaction.
+
+In the Congo River we saw only two hippos, and both of them were
+dead. They had been shot from a steamer. If the hippo is killed in
+the water, it is impossible to recover the body at once. It sinks
+and does not rise, some say, for an hour, others say for seven
+hours. As in an hour the current may have carried the body four
+miles below where it sank, the steamer does not wait, and the
+destruction of the big beast is simple murder. There should be a law
+in the Congo to prevent their destruction, and, no doubt, if the
+State thought it could make a few francs out of protecting the
+hippo, as it makes many million francs by preserving the elephant,
+which it does for the ivory, such a law would exist. We soon saw
+many hippos, but although we could not persuade the only other
+passenger not to fire at them, there are a few hippos still alive in
+the Congo. For, the only time the Captain and I were positive he
+hit anything, was when he fired over our heads and blew off the roof
+of the bridge.
+
+When first we saw the two dead hippos, one of them was turning and
+twisting so violently that we thought he was alive. But, as we drew
+near, we saw the strange convulsions were due to two enormous and
+ugly crocodiles, who were fiercely pulling at the body. Crocodiles
+being man-eaters, we had no feelings about shooting them, either in
+the water or up a tree; and I hope we hit them. In any event, after
+we fired the body drifted on in peace.
+
+On my return trip, going with the stream, when the boat covers about
+four times the distance she makes when steaming against it, I saw
+many hippos. In one day I counted sixty-nine. But on our way up the
+Congo, until we turned into the Kasai River, we saw none.
+
+So, on the first night we camped in the Kasai I had begun to think I
+never would see one, and I went ashore both skeptical and
+discouraged. We had stopped, not at a wood post, but at a place on
+the river's bank previously untouched by man, where there was a
+stretch of beach, and then a higher level with trees and tall
+grasses. Driven deep in this beach were the footprints of a large
+elephant. They looked as though some one had amused himself by
+sinking a bucket in the mud, and then pulling it out. For sixty
+yards I followed the holes and finally lost them in a confusion of
+other tracks. The place had been so trampled upon that it was beaten
+into a basin. It looked as though every animal in the Kasai had met
+there to hold a dance. There were the deep imprints of the hippos
+and the round foot of the elephant, with the marks of the big toes
+showing as clearly as though they had been scooped out of the mud
+with a trowel, the hoofs of buffalo as large as the shoe of a cart
+horse, and the arrow-like marks of the antelope, some in dainty
+little Vs, others measuring three inches across, and three inches
+from the base to the point. They came from every direction, down the
+bank and out of the river; and crossed and recrossed, and beneath
+the fresh prints that had been made that morning at sunrise, were
+those of days before rising up sharply out of the sun-dried clay,
+like bas-reliefs in stucco. I had gone ashore in a state of mind so
+skeptical that I was as surprised as Crusoe at the sight of
+footprints. It was as though the boy who did not believe in fairies
+suddenly stumbled upon them sliding down the moonbeams. One felt
+distinctly apologetic--as though uninvited he had pushed himself
+into a family gathering. At the same time there was the excitement
+of meeting in their own homes the strange peoples I had seen only in
+the springtime, when the circus comes to New York, in the basement
+of Madison Square Garden, where they are our pitiful prisoners,
+bruising their shoulders against bars. Here they were monarchs of
+all they surveyed. I was the intruder; and, looking down at the
+marks of the great paws and delicate hoofs, I felt as much out of
+place as would a grizzly bear in a Fifth Avenue club. And I behaved
+much as would the grizzly bear. I rushed back for my rifle intent on
+killing something.
+
+The sun had just set; the moon was shining faintly: it was the
+moment the beasts of the jungle came to the river to drink. Anfossi,
+although he had spent three years in the Congo and had three years'
+contract still to work out, was as determined to kill something as
+was the tenderfoot from New York.
+
+Sixty yards from the stern of the _Deliverance_ was the basin I had
+discovered; at an equal distance from her bow, a stream plunged into
+the river. Anfossi argued the hippos would prefer to drink the clear
+water of the stream, to the muddy water of the basin, and elected to
+watch at the stream. I carried a deck chair to the edge of my basin
+and placed it in the shadow of the trees. Anfossi went into our
+cabin for his rifle. At that exact moment a hippopotamus climbed
+leisurely out of the river and plunged into the stream. One of the
+soldiers on shore saw him and rushed for the boat. Anfossi sent my
+boy on the jump for me and, like a gentleman, waited until I had
+raced the sixty yards. But when we reached the stream there was
+nothing visible but the trampled grass and great holes in the mud
+and near us in the misty moonlight river something that puffed and
+blew slowly and luxuriously, as would any fat gentleman who had been
+forced to run for it. Had I followed Anfossi's judgment and gone
+along the bank sixty yards ahead, instead of sixty yards astern of
+the _Deliverance_, at the exact moment at which I sank into my deck
+chair, the hippo would have emerged at my feet. It is even betting
+as to which of us would have been the more scared.
+
+The next day, and for days after, we saw nothing but hippos. We saw
+them floating singly and in family groups, with generally four or
+five cows to one bull, and sometimes in front a baby hippo no larger
+than a calf, which the mother with her great bulk would push against
+the swift current, as you see a tugboat in the lee of a great liner.
+Once, what I thought was a spit of rocks suddenly tumbled apart and
+became twenty hippos, piled more or less on top of each other.
+During that one day, as they floated with the current, enjoying
+their afternoon's nap, we saw thirty-four. They impressed me as the
+most idle, and, therefore, the most aristocratic of animals. They
+toil not, neither do they spin; they had nothing to do but float in
+the warm water and the bright sunshine; their only effort was to
+open their enormous jaws and yawn luxuriously, in the pure content
+of living, in absolute boredom. They reminded you only of fat gouty
+old gentlemen, puffing and blowing in the pool at the Warm Springs.
+
+The next chance we had at one of them on shore came on our first
+evening in the Kasai just before sunset. Captain Jensen was steering
+for a flat island of sand and grass where he meant to tie up for the
+night. About fifty yards from the spot for which we were making, was
+the only tree on the island, and under it with his back to us, and
+leisurely eating the leaves of the lower branches, exactly as though
+he were waiting for us by appointment, was a big gray hippo. His
+back being toward us, we could not aim at his head, and he could not
+see us. But the _Deliverance_ is not noiseless, and, hearing the
+paddle-wheel, the hippo turned, saw us, and bolted for the river.
+The hippopotamus is as much at home in the water as the seal. To get
+to the water, if he is surprised out of it, and to get under it, if
+he is alarmed while in it, is instinct. If he does venture ashore,
+he goes only a few rods from the bank and then only to forage. His
+home is the river, and he rushes to bury himself in it as naturally
+as the squirrel makes for a tree. This particular hippo ran for the
+river as fast as a horse coming at a slow trot. He was a very badly
+scared hippo. His head was high in the air, his fat sides were
+shaking, and the one little eye turned toward us was filled with
+concern. Behind him the yellow sun was setting into the lagoons. On
+the flat stretch of sand he was the only object, and against the
+horizon loomed as large as a freight car. That must be why we both
+missed him. I tried to explain that the reason I missed him was
+that, never before having seen so large an animal running for his
+life, I could not watch him do it and look at the gun sights. No one
+believed that was why I missed him. I did not believe it myself. In
+any event neither of us hit his head, and he plunged down the bank
+to freedom, carrying most of the bank with him. But, while we still
+were violently blaming each other, at about two hundred yards below
+the boat, he again waddled out of the river and waded knee deep up
+the little stream. Keeping the bunches of grass between us, I ran up
+the beach, aimed at his eye and this time hit him fairly enough.
+With a snort he rose high in the air, and so, for an instant,
+balanced his enormous bulk. The action was like that of a horse
+that rears on his hind legs, when he is whipped over the nose. And
+apparently my bullet hurt him no more than the whip the horse, for
+he dropped heavily to all fours, and again disappeared into the
+muddy river. Our disappointment and chagrin were intense, and at
+once Anfossi and I organized a hunt for that evening. To encourage
+us, while we were sitting on the bridge making a hasty dinner,
+another hippopotamus had the impertinence to rise, blowing like a
+whale, not ten feet from where we sat. We could have thrown our tin
+cups and hit him; but he was in the water, and now we were seeking
+only those on land.
+
+ [Illustration: Mr. Davis and Native "Boy," on the Kasai River.]
+
+Two years ago when the atrocities along the Kasai made the natives
+fear the white man and the white man fear the natives, each of the
+river boats was furnished with a stand of Albini rifles. Three of
+the black soldiers, who were keen sportsmen, were served with these
+muskets, and as soon as the moon rose, the soldiers and Anfossi, my
+black boy, with an extra gun, and I set forth to clear the island of
+hippos. To the stranger it was a most curious hunt. The island was
+perfectly flat and bare, and the river had eaten into it and
+overflowed it with tiny rivulets and deep, swift-running streams.
+Into these rivulets and streams the soldiers plunged, one in front,
+feeling the depth of the water with a sounding rod, and as he led we
+followed. The black men made a splendid picture. They were naked but
+for breech-cloths, and the moonlight flashed on their wet skins and
+upon the polished barrels of the muskets. But, as a sporting
+proposition, as far as I could see, we had taken on the hippopotamus
+at his own game. We were supposed to be on an island, but the water
+was up to our belts and running at five miles an hour. I could not
+understand why we had not openly and aboveboard walked into the
+river. Wading waist high in the water with a salmon rod I could
+understand, but not swimming around in a river with a gun. The force
+of the shallowest stream was the force of the great river behind it,
+and wherever you put your foot, the current, on its race to the sea,
+annoyed at the impediment, washed the sand from under the sole of
+your foot and tugged at your knees and ankles. To add to the
+interest the three soldiers held their muskets at full cock, and as
+they staggered for a footing each pointed his gun at me. There also
+was a strange fish about the size of an English sole that sprang out
+of the water and hurled himself through space. Each had a white
+belly, and as they skimmed past us in the moonlight it was as though
+some one was throwing dinner plates. After we had swum the length of
+the English Channel, we returned to the boat. As to that midnight
+hunt I am still uncertain as to whether we were hunting the hippos
+or the hippos were hunting us.
+
+The next morning we had our third and last chance at a hippo.
+
+It is distinctly a hard-luck story. We had just gone on the bridge
+for breakfast when we saw him walking slowly from us along an island
+of white sand as flat as your hand, and on which he loomed large as
+a haystack. Captain Jensen was a true sportsman. He jerked the bell
+to the engine-room, and at full speed the _Deliverance_ raced for
+the shore. The hippo heard us, and, like a baseball player caught
+off base, tried to get back to the river. Captain Jensen danced on
+the deck plates:
+
+"Schoot it! schoot it!" he yelled, "Gotfurdamn! schoot it!" When
+Anfossi and I fired, the _Deliverance_ was a hundred yards from the
+hippo, and the hippo was not five feet from the bank. In another
+instant, he would have been over it and safe. But when we fired, he
+went down as suddenly as though a safe had dropped on him. Except
+that he raised his head, and rolled it from side to side, he
+remained perfectly still. From his actions, or lack of actions, it
+looked as though one of the bullets had broken his back; and when
+the blacks saw he could not move they leaped and danced and
+shrieked. To them the death of the big beast promised much chop.
+
+But Captain Jensen was not so confident. "Schoot it," he continued
+to shout, "we lose him yet! Gotfurdamn! schoot it!"
+
+My gun was an American magazine rifle, holding five cartridges. We
+now were very near the hippo, and I shot him in the head twice, and,
+once, when he opened them, in the jaws. At each shot his head would
+jerk with a quick toss of pain, and at the sight the blacks screamed
+with delight that was primitively savage. After the last shot, when
+Captain Jensen had brought the _Deliverance_ broadside to the bank,
+the hippo ceased to move. The boat had not reached the shore before
+the boys with the steel hawser were in the water; the gangplank was
+run out, and the black soldiers and wood boys, with their knives,
+were dancing about the hippo and hacking at his tail. Their idea was
+to make him the more quickly bleed to death. I ran to the cabin for
+more cartridges. It seemed an absurd precaution. I was as sure I had
+the head of that hippo as I was sure that my own was still on my
+neck. My only difficulty was whether to hang the head in the front
+hall or in the dining-room. It might be rather too large for the
+dining-room. That was all that troubled me. After three minutes,
+when I was back on deck, the hippo still lay immovable. Certainly
+twenty men were standing about him; three were sawing off his tail,
+and the women were chanting triumphantly a song they used to sing in
+the days when the men were allowed to hunt, and had returned
+successful with food.
+
+On the bridge was Anfossi with his camera. Before the men had
+surrounded the hippo he had had time to snap one picture of it. I
+had just started after my camera, when from the blacks there was a
+yell of alarm, of rage, and amazement. The hippo had opened his
+eyes and raised his head. I shoved the boys out of the way, and,
+putting the gun close to his head, fired pointblank. I wanted to put
+him out of pain. I need not have distressed myself. The bullet
+affected him no more than a quinine pill. What seemed chiefly to
+concern him, what apparently had brought him back to life, was the
+hacking at his tail. That was an indignity he could not brook.
+
+His expression, and he had a perfectly human expression, was one of
+extreme annoyance and of some slight alarm, as though he were
+muttering: "This is no place for _me_," and, without more ado, he
+began to roll toward the river. Without killing some one, I could
+not again use the rifle. The boys were close upon him, prying him
+back with the gangplank, beating him with sticks of firewood, trying
+to rope him with the steel hawser. On the bridge Captain Jensen and
+Anfossi were giving orders in Danish and Italian, and on the bank I
+swore in American. Everybody shoved and pushed and beat at the great
+bulk, and the great bulk rolled steadily on. We might as well have
+tried to budge the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He reached the bank, he
+crushed it beneath him, and, like a suspension bridge, splashed into
+the water. Even then, we who watched him thought he would stick fast
+between the boat and the bank, that the hawser would hold him. But
+he sank like a submarine, and we stood gaping at the muddy water and
+saw him no more. When I recovered from my first rage I was glad he
+was still alive to float in the sun and puff and blow and open his
+great jaws in a luxurious yawn. I could imagine his joining his
+friends after his meeting with us, and remarking in reference to our
+bullets: "I find the mosquitoes are quite bad this morning."
+
+With this chapter is published the photograph Anfossi took, from the
+deck of the steamer, of our hippo--the hippo that was too stupid to
+know when he was dead. It is not a good photograph, but of our hippo
+it is all we have to show. I am still undecided whether to hang it
+in the hall or the dining-room.
+
+ [Illustration: The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead.]
+
+The days I spent on my trip up the river were of delightful
+sameness, sunshine by day, with the great panorama drifting past,
+and quiet nights of moonlight. For diversion, there were many
+hippos, crocodiles, and monkeys, and, though we saw only their
+tracks and heard them only in the jungle, great elephants. And
+innumerable strange birds--egrets, eagles, gray parrots, crimson
+cranes, and giant flamingoes--as tall as a man and from tip to tip
+measuring eight feet.
+
+Each day the programme was the same. The arrival at the wood post,
+where we were given only excuses and no wood, and where once or
+twice we unloaded blue cloth and bags of salt, which is the currency
+of the Upper Congo, and the halt for hours to cut wood in the
+forest.
+
+Once we stopped at a mission and noted the contrast it made with the
+bare, unkempt posts of the State. It was the Catholic mission at
+Wombali, and it was a beauty spot of flowers, thatched houses,
+grass, and vegetables. There was a brickyard, and schools, and
+sewing-machines, and the blacks, instead of scowling at us, nodded
+and smiled and looked happy and contented. The Father was a great
+red-bearded giant, who seemed to have still stored up in him all the
+energy of the North. While the steamer was unloaded he raced me
+over the vegetable garden and showed me his farm. I had seen other
+of the Catholic Missions, and I spoke of how well they looked, of
+the signs they gave of hard work, and of consideration for the
+blacks.
+
+"I am not of that Order," the Father said gravely. He was speaking
+in English, and added, as though he expected some one to resent it:
+"We are Jesuits." No one resented it, and he added: "We have our
+Order in your country. Do you know Fordham College?"
+
+Did I know it? If you are trying to find our farm, the automobile
+book tells you to leave Fordham College on your left after Jerome
+Avenue.
+
+"Of course, I know it," I said. "They have one of the best baseball
+nines near New York; they play the Giants every spring."
+
+The Reverend Father started.
+
+"They play with Giants!" he gasped.
+
+I did not know how to say "baseball nines" in French, but at least
+he was assured that whatever it was, it was one of the best near New
+York.
+
+Then Captain Jensen's little black boy ran up to tell me the
+steamer was waiting, and began in Bangalese to beg something of the
+Father. The priest smiled and left us, returning with a rosary and
+crucifix, which the boy hung round his neck, and then knelt, and the
+red-bearded Father laid his fingers on the boy's kinky head. He was
+a very happy boy over his new possession, and it was much coveted by
+all the others. One of the black mammies, to ward off evil from the
+little naked baby at her breast, offered an arm's length of blue
+cloth for "the White Man's fetish."
+
+ [Illustration: The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission.]
+
+My voyage up the Kasai ended at Dima, the headquarters of the Kasai
+Concession. I had been told that at Dima I would find a rubber
+plantation, and I had gone there to see it. I found that the
+plantation was four days distant, and that the boat for the
+plantation did not start for six days. I also had been told by the
+English missionaries at Dima, that I would find an American mission.
+When I reached Dima I learned that the American mission was at a
+station further up the river, which could not be reached sooner than
+a month. That is the sort of information upon which in the Congo
+one is forced to regulate his movements. As there was at Dima
+neither mission nor plantation, and as the only boat that would
+leave it in ten days was departing the next morning, I remained
+there only one night. It was a place cut out of the jungle, two
+hundred yards square, and of all stations I saw in the Congo, the
+best managed. It is the repair shop for the steamers belonging to
+the Kasai Concession, as well as the headquarters of the company and
+the residence of the director, M. Dryepoint. He and Van Damme seemed
+to be the most popular officials in the Congo. M. Dryepoint was up
+the river, so I did not meet him, but I was most courteously and
+hospitably entertained by M. Fumière. He gave me a whole house to
+myself, and personally showed me over his small kingdom. All the
+houses were of brick, and the paths and roads were covered with
+gravel and lined with flowers. Nothing in the Congo is more curious
+than this pretty town of suburban villas and orderly machine shops;
+with the muddy river for a street and the impenetrable jungle for a
+back yard. The home of the director at Dima is the proud boast of
+the entire Congo. And all they say of it is true. It did have a
+billiard table and ice, and a piano, and M. Fumière invited me to
+join his friends at an excellent dinner. In furnishing this
+celebrated house, the idea had apparently been to place in it the
+things one would least expect to find in the jungle, or, without
+wishing to be ungracious, anywhere. So, although there are no women
+at Dima, there are great mirrors in brass frames, chandeliers of
+glass with festoons and pendants of glass, metal lamps with shades
+of every color, painted plaster statuettes and carved silk-covered
+chairs. In the red glow of the lamps, surrounded by these Belgian
+atrocities, M. Fumière sat down to the pianola. The heat of Africa
+filled the room; on one side we could have touched the jungle, on
+the other in the river the hippopotamus puffed and snorted. M.
+Fumière pulled out the stops, and upon the heat and silence of the
+night, floated the "Evening Star," Mascagni's "Intermezzo," and
+"Chin-chin Chinaman."
+
+Next morning I left for Leopoldville in a boat much larger than the
+_Deliverance_, but with none of her cheer or good-fellowship. This
+boat was run by the black wife of the captain. Trailing her velvet
+gown, and cleaning her teeth with a stick of wood, she penetrated to
+every part of the steamer, making discipline impossible and driving
+the crew out of control.
+
+I was glad to escape at Kinchassa to the clean and homelike bungalow
+and beautiful gardens of the only Englishman still in the employ of
+the State, Mr. Cuthbert Malet, who gave me hospitably of his scanty
+store of "Scotch," and, what was even more of a sacrifice, of his
+precious handful of eggs. A week later I was again in Boma, waiting
+for the _Nigeria_ to take me back to Liverpool.
+
+Before returning to the West Coast and leaving the subject of the
+Congo, I wish to testify to what seemed to me the enormously
+important work that is being done by the missionaries. I am not
+always an admirer of the missionary. Some of those one meets in
+China and Japan seem to be taking much more interest in their own
+bodies than in the souls of others. But, in the Congo, almost the
+only people who are working in behalf of the natives are those
+attached to the missions. Because they bear witness against Leopold,
+much is said by his hired men and press agents against them. But
+they are deserving of great praise. Some of them are narrow and
+bigoted, and one could wish they were much more tolerant of their
+white brothers in exile, but compared with the good they do, these
+faults count for nothing. It is due to them that Europe and the
+United States know the truth about the Congo. They were the first to
+bear witness, and the hazardous work they still are doing for their
+fellow men is honest, practical Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+OLD CALABAR
+
+
+While I was up the Congo and the Kasai rivers, Mrs. Davis had
+remained at Boma, and when I rejoined her, we booked passage home on
+the _Nigeria_. We chose the _Nigeria_, which is an Elder-Dempster
+freight and passenger steamer, in preference to the fast mail
+steamer because of the ports of the West Coast we wished to see as
+many as possible. And, on her six weeks' voyage to Liverpool, the
+_Nigeria_ promised to spend as much time at anchor as at sea. On the
+Coast it is a more serious matter to reserve a cabin than in New
+York. You do not stop at an uptown office, and on a diagram of the
+ship's insides, as though you were playing roulette, point at a
+number. Instead, as you are to occupy your cabin, not for one, but
+for six, weeks, you search, as vigilantly as a navy officer looking
+for contraband, the ship herself and each cabin.
+
+But going aboard was a simple ceremony. The Hôtel Splendide stands
+on the bank of the Congo River. After saying "Good-by" to her
+proprietor, I walked to the edge of the water and waved my helmet.
+In the Congo, a white man standing in the sun without a hat is a
+spectacle sufficiently thrilling to excite the attention of all, and
+at once Captain Hughes of the _Nigeria_ sent a cargo boat to the
+rescue, and on the shoulders of naked Kroo boys Mrs. Davis and the
+maid, and the trunks, spears, tents, bathtubs, carved idols, native
+mats, and a live mongoos were dropped into it, and we were paddled
+to the gangway.
+
+"If that's all, we might as well get under way," said Captain
+Hughes. The anchor chains creaked, from the bank the proprietor of
+the Splendide waved his hand, and the long voyage to Liverpool had
+begun. It was as casual as halting and starting a cable-car.
+
+According to schedule, after leaving the Congo, we should have gone
+south and touched at Loanda. But on this voyage, outward bound, the
+_Nigeria_ had carried, to help build the railroad at Lobito Bay, a
+deckload of camels. They had proved trying passengers, and instead
+of first touching at the Congo, Captain Hughes had continued on
+south and put them ashore. So we were robbed of seeing both Loanda
+and the camels.
+
+This line, until Calabar is reached, carries but few passengers,
+and, except to receive cargo, the ship is not fully in commission.
+During this first week she is painted, and holystoned, her carpets
+are beaten, her cabins scrubbed and aired, and the passengers mess
+with the officers. So, of the ship's life, we acquired an intimate
+knowledge, her interests became our own, and the necessity of
+feeding her gaping holds with cargo was personal and acute. On a
+transatlantic steamer, when once the hatches are down, the captain
+need think only of navigation; on these coasters, the hatches never
+are down, and the captain, that sort of captain dear to the heart of
+the owners, is the man who fills the holds.
+
+A skipper going ashore to drum up trade was a novel spectacle.
+Imagine the captain of one of the Atlantic greyhounds prying among
+the warehouses on West Street, demanding of the merchants:
+"Anything going my way, this trip?" He would scorn to do it. Before
+his passengers have passed the custom officers, he is in mufti, and
+on his way to his villa on Brooklyn Heights, or to the Lambs Club,
+and until the Blue Peter is again at the fore, little he cares for
+passengers, mails, or cargo. But the captain of a "coaster" must be
+sailor and trader, too. He is expected to navigate a coast, the
+latest chart of which is dated somewhere near 1830, and at which the
+waves rush in walls of spray, sometimes as high as a three-story
+house. He must speak all the known languages of Europe, and all the
+unknown tongues of innumerable black brothers. At each port he must
+entertain out of his own pocket the agents of all the trading
+houses, and, in his head, he must keep the market price, "when laid
+down in Liverpool," of mahogany, copra, copal, rubber, palm oil, and
+ivory. To see that the agent has not overlooked a few bags of ground
+nuts, or a dozen puncheons of oil, he must go on shore and peer into
+the compound of each factory, and on board he must keep peace
+between the Kroo boys and the black deck passengers, and see that
+the white passengers with a temperature of 105, do not drink more
+than is good for them. At least, those are a few of the duties the
+captains on the ships controlled by Sir Alfred Jones, who is Elder
+and Dempster, are expected to perform. No wonder Sir Alfred is
+popular.
+
+Our first port of call was Landana, in Portuguese territory, but two
+ships of the Woermann Line were there ahead of us and had gobbled up
+all the freight. So we could but up anchor and proceed to
+Libreville, formerly the capital of the French Congo. At five in the
+morning by the light of a ship's lantern, we were paddled ashore to
+drum up trade. We found two traders, Ives and Thomas, who had
+waiting for the _Nigeria_ at the mouth of the Gabun River six
+hundred logs of mahogany, and, in consequence, there was general
+rejoicing, and Scotch and "sparklets," and even music from a German
+music-box that would burst into song only after it had been fed with
+a copper. One of the clerks said that Ives had forgotten how to
+extract the coppers and in consequence was using the music-box as a
+savings bank.
+
+In the French Congo the natives are permitted to trade; in the
+Congo Free State they are not, or, rather, they have nothing with
+which to trade, and the contrast between the empty "factories" of
+the Congo and those of Libreville, crowded with natives buying and
+selling, was remarkable. There also was a conspicuous difference in
+the quality and variety of the goods. In Leopold's Congo "trade"
+goods is a term of contempt. It describes articles manufactured only
+for those who have no choice and must accept whatever is offered.
+When your customers must take what you please to give them the
+quality of your goods is likely to deteriorate. Salt of the poorest
+grade, gaudy fabrics that neither "wear" nor "wash," bars of coarse
+soap (the native is continually washing his single strip of cloth),
+and axe-heads made of iron, are what Leopold thinks are a fair
+exchange for the forced labor of the black.
+
+But the articles I found in the factories in Libreville were what,
+in the Congo, are called "white man's goods" and were of excellent
+quality and in great variety. There were even French novels and
+cigars. Some of the latter, called the Young American on account of
+the name and the flag on the lid, tempted me, until I saw they were
+manufactured by Dusseldorffer and Vanderswassen, and one suspected
+Rotterdam.
+
+In Ives's factory I saw for the first time a "trade" rifle, or Tower
+musket. In the vernacular of the Coast, they are "gas-pipe" guns.
+They are put together in England, and to a white man are a most
+terrifying weapon. The original Tower muskets, such as, in the days
+of '76, were hung over the fireplace of the forefathers of the Sons
+of the Revolution, were manufactured in England, and stamped with
+the word "Tower," and for the reigning king G.R. I suppose at that
+date at the Tower of London there was an arsenal; but I am ready to
+be corrected. To-day the guns are manufactured at Birmingham, but
+they still have the flint lock, and still are stamped with the word
+"Tower" and the royal crown over the letters G.R., and with the
+arrow which is supposed to mark the property of the government. The
+barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore is that of an
+artesian well. The native fills four inches of this cavity with
+powder and the remaining three feet with rusty nails, barbed wire,
+leaden slugs, and the legs and broken parts of iron pots. An officer
+of the W.A.F.F.'s, in a fight in the bush in South Nigeria, had one
+of these things fired at him from a distance of fifteen feet. He
+told me all that saved him was that when the native pulled the
+trigger the recoil of the gun "kicked" the muzzle two feet in the
+air and the native ten feet into the bush. I bought a Tower rifle at
+the trade price, a pound, and brought it home. But although my
+friends have offered to back either end of the gun as being the more
+destructive, we have found no one with a sufficient sporting spirit
+to determine the point.
+
+Libreville is a very pretty town, but when it was laid out the
+surveyors just missed placing the Equator in its main street. It is
+easy to understand why with such a live wire in the vicinity
+Libreville is warm. From the same cause it also is rich in flowers,
+vines, and trees growing in generous, undisciplined abundance,
+making of Libreville one vast botanical garden, and burying the town
+and its bungalows under screens of green and branches of scarlet
+and purple flowers. Close to the surf runs an avenue bordered by
+giant cocoanut palms and, after the sun is down, this is the
+fashionable promenade. Here every evening may be seen in their
+freshest linen the six married white men of Libreville, and, in the
+latest Paris frocks, the six married ladies, while from the verandas
+of the factories that line the sea front and from under the paper
+lanterns of the Café Guion the clerks and traders sip their absinthe
+and play dominoes, and cast envious glances at the six fortunate
+fellow exiles.
+
+For several days we lay a few miles south of Libreville, off the
+mouth of the Gabun River, taking in the logs of mahogany. It was a
+continuous performance of the greatest interest. I still do not
+understand why all those engaged in it were not drowned, or pounded
+to a pulp. Just before we touched at the Gabun River, two tramp
+steamers, chartered by Americans, carried off a full cargo of this
+mahogany to the States. It was an experiment the result of which the
+traders of Libreville are awaiting with interest. The mahogany that
+the reader sees in America probably comes from Hayti, Cuba, or
+Belize, and is of much finer quality than that of the Gabun River,
+which latter is used for making what the trade calls "fancy"
+cigar-boxes and cheap furniture. But before it becomes a cigar-box
+it passes through many adventures. Weeks before the steamer arrives
+the trader, followed by his black boys, explores the jungle and
+blazes the trees. Then the boys cut trails through the forest, and,
+using logs for rollers, drag and push the tree trunks to the bank of
+the river. There the tree is cut into huge cubes, weighing about a
+ton, and measuring twelve to fifteen feet in length and three feet
+across each face. A boy can "shape" one of these logs in a day.
+
+Although his pay varies according to whether the tributaries of the
+river are full or low, so making the moving of the logs easy or
+difficult, he can earn about three pounds ten shillings a month,
+paid in cash. Compared with the eighty cents a month paid only a few
+miles away in the Congo Free State, and in "trade" goods, these are
+good wages. When the log is shaped the mark of the trader is branded
+on it with an iron, just as we brand cattle, and it is turned loose
+on the river. At the mouth of the river there is little danger of
+the log escaping, for the waves are stronger than the tide, and
+drive the logs upon the shore. There, in the surf, we found these
+tons of mahogany pounding against each other. In the ship's
+steam-launch were iron chains, a hundred yards long, to which, at
+intervals, were fastened "dogs," or spikes. These spikes were driven
+into the end of a log, the brand upon the log was noted by the
+captain and trader, and the logs, chained together like the vertebræ
+of a great sea serpent, were towed to the ship's side. There they
+were made fast, and three Kroo boys knocked the spike out of each
+log, warped a chain around it, and made fast that chain to the steel
+hawser of the winch. As it was drawn to the deck a Senegalese
+soldier, acting for the Customs, gave it a second blow with a
+branding hammer, and, thundering and smashing, it swung into the
+hold.
+
+ [Illustration: There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+ Pounding Against Each Other.]
+
+In the "round up" of the logs the star performers were the three
+Kroo boys at the ship's side. For days, in fascinated horror, the
+six passengers watched them, prayed for them, and made bets as to
+which would be the first to die. One understands that a Kroo boy is
+as much at home in the sea as on shore, but these boys were neither
+in the sea nor on shore. They were balancing themselves on blocks of
+slippery wood that weighed a ton, but which were hurled about by the
+great waves as though they were life-belts. All night the hammering
+of the logs made the ship echo like a monster drum, and all day
+without an instant's pause each log reared and pitched, spun like a
+barrel, dived like a porpoise, or, broadside, battered itself
+against the iron plates. But, no matter what tricks it played, a
+Kroo boy rode it as easily as though it were a horse in a
+merry-go-round.
+
+It was a wonderful exhibition. It furnished all the thrills that one
+gets when watching a cowboy on a bucking bronco, or a trained seal.
+Again and again a log, in wicked conspiracy with another log, would
+plan to entice a Kroo boy between them, and smash him. At the sight
+the passengers would shriek a warning, the boy would dive between
+the logs, and a mass of twelve hundred pounds of mahogany would
+crash against a mass weighing fifteen hundred with a report like
+colliding freight cars.
+
+And then, as, breathless, we waited to see what once was a Kroo boy
+float to the surface, he would appear sputtering and grinning, and
+saying to us as clearly as a Kroo smile can say it: "He never
+touched me!"
+
+ [Illustration: A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains.]
+
+Two days after we had stored away the mahogany we anchored off
+Duala, the capital of the German Cameroons. Duala is built upon a
+high cliff, and from the water the white and yellow buildings with
+many pillars gave it the appearance of a city. Instead, it is a
+clean, pretty town. With the German habit of order, it has been laid
+out like barracks, but with many gardens, well-kept, shaded streets,
+and high, cool houses, scientifically planned to meet the
+necessities of the tropics. At Duala the white traders and officials
+were plump and cheerful looking, and in the air there was more of
+prosperity than fever. The black and white sentry boxes and the
+native soldiers practising the stork march of the Kaiser's army were
+signs of a rigid military rule, but the signs of Germany's efforts
+in trade were more conspicuous. Nowhere on the coast did we see as
+at Duala such gorgeous offices as those of the great trading house
+of Woermann, the hated rivals of "Sir Alfred," such carved
+furniture, such shining brass railings, and nowhere else did we see
+plate-glass windows, in which, with unceasing wonder, the natives
+stared at reflections of their own persons. In the river there was a
+private dry dock of the Woermanns, and along the wharfs for acres
+was lumber for the Woermanns, boxes of trade goods, puncheons and
+casks for the Woermanns, private cooper shops and private machine
+shops and private banks for the Woermanns. The house flag of the
+Woermanns became as significant as that of a reigning sovereign. One
+felt inclined to salute it.
+
+The success of the German merchant on the East Coast and over all
+the world appears to be a question of character. He is patient,
+methodical, painstaking; it is his habit of industry that is helping
+him to close port after port to English, French, and American goods.
+The German clerks do not go to the East Coast or to China and South
+America to drink absinthe or whiskey, or to play dominoes or
+cricket. They work twice as long as do the other white men, and
+during those longer office hours they toil twice as hard. One of our
+passengers was a German agent returning for his vacation. I used to
+work in the smoking-room and he always was at the next table, also
+at work, on his ledgers and account books. He was so industrious
+that he bored me, and one day I asked him why, instead of spoiling
+his vacation with work, he had not balanced his books before he left
+the Coast.
+
+"It is an error," he said; "I can not find him." And he explained
+that in the record of his three years' stewardship, which he was to
+turn over to the directors in Berlin, there was somewhere a mistake
+of a sixpence.
+
+"But," I protested, "what's sixpence to you? You drink champagne all
+day. You begin at nine in the morning!"
+
+"I drink champagne," said the clerk, "because for three years I have
+myself alone in the bush lived, but, can I to my directors go with a
+book not balanced?" He laid his hand upon his heart and shook his
+head. "It is my heart that tells me 'No!'"
+
+After three weeks he gave a shout, his face blushed with pleasure,
+and actual tears were in his eyes. He had dug out the error, and at
+once he celebrated the recovery of the single sixpence by giving me
+twenty-four shillings' worth of champagne. It is a true story, and
+illustrates, I think, the training and method of the German mind, of
+the industry of the merchants who are trading over all the seas. As
+a rule the "trade" goods "made in Germany" are "shoddy." They do not
+compare in quality with those of England or the States; in every
+foreign port you will find that the English linen is the best, that
+the American agricultural implements, American hardware, saws, axes,
+machetes, are superior to those manufactured in any other country.
+But the German, though his goods are poorer, cuts the coat to please
+the customer. He studies the wishes of the man who is to pay. He is
+not the one who says: "Take it, or leave it."
+
+The agent of one of the largest English firms on the Ivory Coast,
+one that started by trading in slaves, said to me: "Our largest
+shipment to this coast is gin. This is a French colony, and if the
+French traders and I were patriots instead of merchants we would
+buy from our own people, but we buy from the Germans, because trade
+follows no flag. They make a gin out of potatoes colored with rum or
+gin, and label it 'Demerara' and 'Jamaica.' They sell it to us on
+the wharf at Antwerp for ninepence a gallon, and we sell it at nine
+francs per dozen bottles. Germany is taking our trade from us
+because she undersells us, and because her merchants don't wait for
+trade to come to them, but go after it. Before the Woermann boat is
+due their agent here will come to my factory and spy out all I have
+in my compound. 'Why don't you ship those logs with us?' he'll ask.
+
+"'Can't spare the boys to carry them to the beach,' I'll say.
+
+"'I'll furnish the boys,' he'll answer. That's the German way.
+
+"The Elder-Dempster boats lie three miles out at sea and blow a
+whistle at us. They act as though by carrying our freight they were
+doing us a favor. These German ships, to save you the long pull,
+anchor close to the beach and lend you their own shore boats and
+their own boys to work your cargo. And if you give them a few tons
+to carry, like as not they'll 'dash' you to a case of 'fizz.' And
+meanwhile the English captain is lying outside the bar tooting his
+whistle and wanting to know if you think he's going to run his ship
+aground for a few bags of rotten kernels. And he can't see, and the
+people at home can't see, why the Germans are crowding us off the
+Coast."
+
+Just outside of Duala, in the native village of Bell Town, is the
+palace and the harem of the ruler of the tribe that gave its name to
+the country, Mango Bell, King of the Cameroons. His brother, Prince
+William, sells photographs and "souvenirs." We bought photographs,
+and on the strength of that hinted at a presentation at court.
+Brother William seemed doubtful, so we bought enough postal cards to
+establish us as _étrangers de distinction_, and he sent up our
+names. With Pivani, Hatton & Cookson's chief clerk we were escorted
+to the royal presence. The palace is a fantastic, pagoda-like
+building of three stories; and furnished with many mirrors, carved
+oak sideboards, and lamp-shades of colored glass. Mango Bell, King
+of the Cameroons, sounds like a character in a comic opera, but the
+king was an extremely serious, tall, handsome, and self-respecting
+negro. Having been educated in England, he spoke much more correct
+English than any of us. Of the few "Kings I Have Met," both tame and
+wild, his manners were the most charming. Back of the palace is an
+enormously long building under one roof. Here live his thirty-five
+queens. To them we were not presented.
+
+ [Illustration: The Palace of the King of the Cameroons.]
+
+Prince William asked me if I knew where in America there was a
+street called Fifth Avenue. I suggested New York. He referred to a
+large Bible, and finding, much to his surprise, that my guess was
+correct, commissioned me to buy him, from a firm on that street,
+just such another Bible as the one in his hand. He forgot to give me
+the money to pay for it, but loaned us a half-dozen little princes
+to bear our purchases to the wharf. For this service their royal
+highnesses graciously condescended to receive a small "dash," and
+with the chief clerk were especially delighted. He, being a
+sleight-of-hand artist, apparently took five-franc pieces out of
+their Sunday clothes and from their kinky hair. When we left they
+were rapidly disrobing to find if any more five-franc pieces were
+concealed about their persons.
+
+The morning after we sailed from Duala we anchored in the river in
+front of Calabar, the capital of Southern Nigeria. Of all the ports
+at which we touched on the Coast, Calabar was the hottest, the best
+looking, and the best administered. It is a model colony, but to
+bring it to the state it now enjoys has cost sums of money entirely
+out of proportion to those the colony has earned. The money has been
+spent in cutting down the jungle, filling in swamps that breed
+mosquitoes and fever, and in laying out gravel walks, water mains,
+and open cement gutters, and in erecting model hospitals, barracks,
+and administrative offices. Even grass has been made to grow, and
+the high bluff upon which are situated the homes of the white
+officials and Government House has been trimmed and cultivated and
+tamed until it looks like an English park. It is a complete
+imitation, even to golf links and tennis courts. But the fight that
+has been made against the jungle has not stopped with golf links. In
+1896 the death rate was ten men out of every hundred. That
+corresponds to what in warfare is a decimating fire, upon which an
+officer, without danger of reproof, may withdraw his men. But at
+Calabar the English doctors did not withdraw, and now the death rate
+is as low as three out of every hundred. That Calabar, or any part
+of the West Coast, will ever be made entirely healthy is doubtful.
+Man can cut down a forest and fill in a swamp, but he can not reach
+up, as to a gas jet, and turn off the sun. And at Calabar, even at
+night when the sun has turned itself off, the humidity and the heat
+leave one sweating, tossing, and gasping for air. In Calabar the
+first thing a white man learns is not to take any liberties with the
+sun. When he dresses, eats, drinks, and moves about the sun is as
+constantly on his mind, as it is on the face of the sun-dial. The
+chief ascent to the top of the bluff where the white people live is
+up a steep cement walk about eighty yards long. At the foot of this
+a white man will be met by four hammock-bearers, and you will see
+him get into the hammock and be carried in it the eighty yards.
+
+For even that short distance he is taking no chances. But while he
+nurses his vitality and cares for his health he does not use the sun
+as an excuse for laziness or for slipshod work. I have never seen a
+place in the tropics where, in spite of the handicap of damp, fierce
+heat, the officers and civil officials are so keenly and constantly
+employed, where the bright work was so bright, and the whitewash so
+white.
+
+Out at the barracks of the West African Frontier Force, the
+W.A.F.F.'s, the officers, instead of from the shade of the veranda
+watching the non-coms. teach a native the manual, were themselves at
+work, and each was howling orders at the black recruits and smashing
+a gun against his hip and shoulder as smartly as a drill sergeant. I
+found the standard maintained at Calabar the more interesting
+because the men were almost entirely their own audience. If they
+make the place healthy, and attractive-looking, and dress for
+dinner, and shy at cocktails, and insist that their tan shoes shall
+glow like meershaum pipes, it is not because of the refining
+presence of lovely women, but because the men themselves like things
+that way. The men of Calabar have learned that when the sun is at
+110, morals, like material things, disintegrate, and that, though
+the temptation is to go about in bath-room slippers and pajamas, one
+is wiser to bolster up his drenched and drooping spirit with a stiff
+shirt front and a mess jacket. They tell that in a bush station in
+upper Nigeria, one officer got his D.S.O. because with an audience
+of only a white sergeant he persisted in a habit of shaving twice a
+day.
+
+ [Illustration: The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell.]
+
+There are very few women in Calabar. There are three or four who are
+wives of officials, two nurses employed by the government, and the
+Mother Superior and Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph, and, of
+course, all of them are great belles. For the Sisters, especially
+the officers, the government people, the traders, the natives, even
+the rival missionaries, have the most tremendous respect and
+admiration. The sacrifice of the woman who, to be near her husband
+on the Coast, consents to sicken and fade and grow old before her
+time, and of the nurse who, to preserve the health of others, risks
+her own, is very great; but the sacrifice of the Sisters, who have
+renounced all thought of home and husband, and who have exiled
+themselves to this steaming swamp-land, seems the most unselfish. In
+order to support the 150 little black boys and girls who are at
+school at the mission, the Sisters rob themselves of everything
+except the little that will keep them alive. Two, in addition to
+their work at the mission, act as nurses in the English hospital,
+and for that they receive together $600. This forms the sole regular
+income of the five women; for each $120 a year. With anything else
+that is given them in charity, they buy supplies for the little
+converts. They live in a house of sandstone and zinc that holds the
+heat like a flat-iron, they are obliged to wear a uniform that is of
+material and fashion so unsuited to the tropics that Dr. Chichester,
+in charge of the hospital, has written in protest against it to
+Rome, and on many days they fast, not because the Church bids them
+so to do, but because they have no food. And with it all, these five
+gentlewomen are always eager, cheerful, sweet of temper, and a
+living blessing to all who meet them. What now troubles them is that
+they have no room to accommodate the many young heathen who come to
+them to be taught to wear clothes, and to be good little boys and
+girls. This is causing the Sisters great distress. Any one who does
+not believe in that selfish theory, that charity begins at home, but
+who would like to help to spread Christianity in darkest Africa and
+give happiness to five noble women, who are giving their lives for
+others, should send a postal money order to Marie T. Martin, the
+Reverend Mother Superior of the Catholic Mission of Old Calabar,
+Southern Nigeria.
+
+And if you are going to do it, as they say in the advertising pages,
+"Do it now!"
+
+ [Illustration: The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+ Their Converts at Old Calabar.]
+
+At Calabar there is a royal prisoner, the King of Benin. He is not
+an agreeable king like His Majesty of the Cameroons, but a grossly
+fat, sensual-looking young man, who, a few years ago, when he was at
+war with the English, made "ju ju" against them by sacrificing three
+hundred maidens, his idea being that the ju ju would drive the
+English out of Benin. It was poor ju ju, for it drove the young man
+himself out of Benin, and now he is a king in exile. As far as I
+could see, the social position of the king is insecure, and
+certainly in Calabar he does not move in the first circles. One
+afternoon, when the four or five ladies of Calabar and Mr. Bedwell,
+the Acting Commissioner, and the officers of the W.A.F.F.'s were at
+the clubhouse having ice-drinks, the king at the head of a retinue
+of cabinet officers, high priests, and wives bore down upon the
+club-house with the evident intention of inviting himself to tea.
+Personally, I should like to have met a young man who could murder
+three hundred girls and worry over it so little that he had not lost
+one of his three hundred pounds, but the others were considerably
+annoyed and sent an A.D.C. to tell him to "Move on!" as though he
+were an organ-grinder, or a performing bear.
+
+"These kings," exclaimed a subaltern of the W.A.F.F.'s, indignantly,
+"are trying to push in everywhere!"
+
+When we departed from Calabar, the only thing that reconciled me to
+leaving it and its charming people, was the fact that when the ship
+moved there was a breeze. While at anchor in the river I had found
+that not being able to breathe by day or to sleep by night in time
+is trying, even to the stoutest constitution.
+
+One of the married ladies of Calabar, her husband, an officer of
+the W.A.F.F.'s, and the captain of the police sailed on the
+_Nigeria_ "on leave," and all Calabar came down to do them honor.
+There was the commissioner's gig, and the marine captain's gig, and
+the police captain's gig, and the gig from "Matilda's," the English
+trading house, and one from the Dutch house and the French house,
+and each gig was manned by black boys in beautiful uniforms and
+fezzes, and each crew fought to tie up to the foot of the
+accommodation ladder. It was as gay as a regatta. On the
+quarter-deck the officers drank champagne, in the captain's cabin
+Hughes treated the traders to beer, in the "square" the non-coms. of
+the W.A.F.F.'s drank ale. The men who were going away on leave tried
+not to look too happy, and those who were going back to the shore
+drank deep and tried not to appear too carelessly gay. A billet on
+the West Coast is regarded by the man who accepts it as a sort of
+sporting proposition, as a game of three innings of nine months
+each, during which he matches his health against the Coast. If he
+lives he wins; if he dies the Coast wins.
+
+After Calabar, at each port off which we anchored, at Ponny,
+Focardos, Lagos, Accra, Cape Coast Castle, and Sekonni, it was
+always the same. Always there came over the side the man going
+"Home," the man who had fought with the Coast and won. He was as
+excited, as jubilant as a prisoner sentenced to death who had
+escaped his executioners. And always the heartiest in their
+congratulations were the men who were left behind, his brother
+officers, or his fellow traders, the men of the Sun Hat Brigade, in
+their unofficial uniforms, in shirtwaists, broad belts from which
+dangled keys and a whistle, beautifully polished tan boots, and with
+a wand-like whip or stick of elephant hide. They swarmed the decks
+and overwhelmed the escaping refugee with good wishes. He had
+cheated their common enemy. By merely keeping alive he had achieved
+a glorious victory. In their eyes he had performed a feat of
+endurance like swimming the English Channel. They crowded to
+congratulate him as people at the pit-mouth congratulate the
+entombed miner, who, after many days of breathing noisome gases,
+drinks the pure air. Even the black boys seem to feel the triumph
+of the white master, and their paddles never flashed so bravely, and
+their songs never rang so wildly, as when they were racing him away
+from the brooding Coast with its poisonous vapors toward the big
+white ship that meant health and home.
+
+Although most of the ports we saw only from across a mile or two of
+breakers, they always sent us something of interest. Sometimes all
+the male passengers came on board drunk. With the miners of the Gold
+Coast and the "Palm Oil Ruffians" it used to be a matter of
+etiquette not to leave the Coast in any other condition. Not so to
+celebrate your escape seemed ungenerous and ungrateful. At Sekondi
+one of the miners from Ashanti was so completely drunk, that he was
+swung over the side, tied up like a plum-pudding, in a bag.
+
+When he emerged from the bag his expression of polite inquiry was
+one with which all could sympathize. To lose consciousness on the
+veranda of a café, and awake with a bump on the deck of a steamer
+many miles at sea, must strengthen one's belief in magic carpets.
+
+Another entertainment for the white passengers was when the boat
+boys fought for the black passengers as they were lowered in the
+mammy-chair. As a rule, in the boats from shore, there were twelve
+boys to paddle and three or four extra men to handle and unhook the
+mammy-chair and the luggage. While the boys with the paddles
+manoeuvred to bring their boat next to the ship's side, the extra
+boys tried to pull their rivals overboard, dragging their hands from
+ropes and gunwales, and beating them with paddles. They did this
+while every second the boat under them was spinning in the air or
+diving ten feet into the hollow of the waves, and trying to smash
+itself and every other boat into driftwood. From the deck the second
+officer would swing a mammy-chair over the side with the idea of
+dropping it into one of these boats. But before the chair could be
+lowered, a rival boat would shove the first one away, and with a
+third boat would be fighting for its place. Meanwhile, high above
+the angry sea, the chair and its cargo of black women would be
+twirling like a weathercock and banging against the ship's side. The
+mammies were too terrified to scream, but the ship's officers
+yelled and swore, the boat's crews shrieked, and the black babies
+howled. Each baby was strapped between the shoulders of the mother.
+A mammy-chair is like one of those two-seated swings in which people
+sit facing one another. If to the shoulders of each person in the
+swing was tied a baby, it is obvious that should the swing bump into
+anything, the baby would get the worst of it. That is what happened
+in the mammy-chair. Every time the chair spun around, the head of a
+baby would come "crack!" against the ship's side. So the babies
+howled, and no one of the ship's passengers, crowded six deep along
+the rail, blamed them. The skull of the Ethiopian may be hard, but
+it is most unfair to be swathed like a mummy so that you can neither
+kick nor strike back, and then have your head battered against a
+five-thousand-ton ship.
+
+How the boys who paddled the shore boats live long enough to learn
+how to handle them is a great puzzle. We were told that the method
+was to take out one green boy with a crew of eleven experts. But how
+did the original eleven become experts? At Accra, where the waves
+are very high and rough, are the best boat boys on the coast. We
+watched the Custom House boat fight her way across the two miles of
+surf to the shore. The fight lasted two hours. It was as thrilling
+as watching a man cross Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. The greater
+part of the two hours the boat stood straight in the air, as though
+it meant to shake the crew into the sea, and the rest of the time it
+ran between walls of water ten feet high and was entirely lost to
+sight. Two things about the paddling on the West Coast make it
+peculiar; the boys sit, not on the thwarts, but on the gunwales, as
+a woman rides a side-saddle, and in many parts of the coast the boys
+use paddles shaped like a fork or a trident. One asks how, sitting
+as they do, they are able to brace themselves, and how with their
+forked paddles they obtained sufficient resistance. A coaster's
+explanation of the split paddle was that the boys did not want any
+more resistance than they could prevent.
+
+ [Illustration: The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+ Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle.]
+
+There is no more royal manner of progress than when one of these
+boats lifts you over the waves, with the boys chanting some wild
+chorus, with their bare bodies glistening, their teeth and eyes
+shining, the splendid muscles straining, and the dripping paddles
+flashing like twelve mirrors.
+
+Some of the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power,
+and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in
+unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a
+sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to the
+newly rich.
+
+I knew I had left the West Coast when, the very night we sailed from
+Sierra Leone, for greater comfort, I reached for a linen bed-spread
+that during four stifling, reeking weeks had lain undisturbed at the
+foot of the berth. During that time I had hated it as a monstrous
+thing; as something as hot and heavy as a red flannel blanket, as a
+buffalo robe. And when, on the following night, I found the
+wind-screen was not in the air port, and that, nevertheless, I still
+was alive, I knew we had passed out of reach of the Equator, and
+that all that followed would be as conventional as the "trippers"
+who joined us at the Canary Isles; and as familiar as the low, gray
+skies, the green, rain-soaked hills, and the complaining Channel
+gulls that convoyed us into Plymouth Harbor.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+ALONG THE EAST COAST
+
+
+Were a man picked up on a flying carpet and dropped without warning
+into Lorenço Marquez, he might guess for a day before he could make
+up his mind where he was, or determine to which nation the place
+belonged.
+
+If he argued from the adobe houses with red-tiled roofs and walls of
+cobalt blue, the palms, and the yellow custom-house, he might think
+he was in Santiago; the Indian merchants in velvet and gold
+embroideries seated in deep, dark shops which breathe out dry,
+pungent odors, might take him back to Bombay; the Soudanese and
+Egyptians in long blue night-gowns and freshly ironed fezzes would
+remind him of Cairo; the dwarfish Portuguese soldiers, of Madeira,
+Lisbon, and Madrid, and the black, bare-legged policemen in khaki
+with great numerals on their chests, of Benin, Sierra Leone, or
+Zanzibar. After he had noted these and the German, French, and
+English merchants in white duck, and the Dutch man-of-warsmen, who
+look like ship's stewards, the French marines in coal-scuttle
+helmets, the British Jack-tars in their bare feet, and the native
+Kaffir women, each wrapped in a single, gorgeous shawl with a black
+baby peering from beneath her shoulder-blades, he would decide, by
+using the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, that he was in the
+Midway of the Chicago Fair.
+
+Several hundred years ago Da Gama sailed into Delagoa Bay and
+founded the town of Lorenço Marquez, and since that time the
+Portuguese have always felt that it is only due to him and to
+themselves to remain there. They have great pride of race, and they
+like the fact that they possess and govern a colony. So, up to the
+present time, in spite of many temptations to dispose of it, they
+have made the ownership of Delagoa Bay an article of their national
+religion. But their national religion does not require of them to
+improve their property. And to-day it is much as it was when the
+sails of Da Gama's fleet first stirred its poisonous vapors.
+
+The harbor itself is an excellent one and the bay is twenty-two
+miles along, but there is only one landing-pier, and that such a
+pier as would be considered inconsistent with the dignity of the
+Larchmont Yacht Club. To the town itself Portugal has been content
+to contribute as her share the gatherers of taxes, collectors of
+customs and dispensers of official seals. She is indifferent to the
+fact that the bulk of general merchandise, wine, and machinery that
+enter her port is brought there by foreigners. She only demands that
+they buy her stamps. Her importance in her own colony is that of a
+toll-gate at the entrance of a great city.
+
+Lorenço Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home.
+When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen
+a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried
+hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months,
+the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were
+robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about one of the
+twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and
+unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of
+Lorenço Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and
+selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous
+of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its
+patrons that "Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests
+will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by
+the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the
+"tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had
+found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat
+difficult.
+
+On her way from Lorenço Marquez to Beira our ship, the _Kanzlar_,
+kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow
+sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of
+outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue
+mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great
+inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern
+coast and against which the waves break with a report like the
+bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and
+the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills
+accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw
+Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four
+stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the
+summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the
+sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the
+lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were
+more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It
+suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the
+board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her
+Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing
+except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this
+should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the
+Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and
+instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt
+were only opened for the summer season and which for the rest of
+the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial
+gales. Beira need only to have added to her "Sea-View" and "Beach"
+hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type
+artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home.
+Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and
+Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and
+Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many
+ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were
+moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Lorenço
+Marquez, was brisk, busy, and clean. Although both are ostensibly
+Portuguese, Beira is to Lorenço Marquez what the cleanest street of
+Greenwich Village, of New York City, is to "Hell's Kitchen" and the
+Chinese Quarter. The houses were well swept and cool, the shops were
+alluring, the streets were of clean shifting white sand, and the
+sidewalks, of gray cement, were as well kept as a Philadelphia
+doorstep. The most curious feature of Beira is her private tram-car
+system. These cars run on tiny tracks which rise out of the sand
+and extend from one end of the town to the other, with branch lines
+running into the yards of shops and private houses. The motive power
+for these cars is supplied by black boys who run behind and push
+them. Their trucks are about half as large as those on the hand-cars
+we see flying along our railroad tracks at home, worked by gangs of
+Italian laborers. On some of the trucks there is only a bench,
+others are shaded by awnings, and a few have carriage-lamps and
+cushioned seats and carpets. Each of them is a private conveyance;
+there is not one which can be hired by the public. When a merchant
+wishes to go down town to the port, his black boys carry his private
+tram-car from his garden and settle it on the rails, the merchant
+seats himself, and the boys push him and his baby-carriage to
+whatever part of the city he wishes to go. When his wife is out
+shopping and stops at a store the boys lift her car into the sand in
+order to make a clear track for any other car which may be coming
+behind them. One would naturally suppose that with the tracks and
+switch-boards and sidings already laid, the next step would be to
+place cars upon them for the convenience of the public, but this is
+not the case, and the tracks through the city are jealously reserved
+for the individuals who tax themselves five pounds a year to extend
+them and to keep them in repair. After the sleds on the island of
+Madeira these private street-cars of Beira struck me as being the
+most curious form of conveyance I had ever seen.
+
+ [Illustration: Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira.]
+
+Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of
+feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some
+of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of
+Cape Town and Durban. But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on
+the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company's possessions,
+and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was
+necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build
+a railroad through the swamp and jungle. This road is now in
+operation. It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the
+brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress
+through the marshes, two hundred of the men working on it died of
+fever. Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the
+Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the
+Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police. How this
+was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied,
+Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of "Judson and the
+Empire." It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored
+it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat. A
+week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all
+the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had
+made no mention of the fact. The result was that the _Kanzlar_ was
+hung up for twenty-four hours. We tried to comfort ourselves by
+thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which
+had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of
+empire.
+
+The _Kanzlar_ could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the
+_Adjutant_, which belongs to the same line and which was created for
+these shallow waters, came to the _Kanzlar_, bringing Chinde with
+her. She brought every white man in the port, and those who could
+not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the _Adjutant_,
+clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed
+high above us. For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as
+though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that
+brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the
+pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the _Adjutant_, in white
+duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of
+Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower
+deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as
+Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and
+gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new
+leather cases. From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and
+from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in
+fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian
+coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound
+and unwound long blue strips of cotton about their shoulders, or
+ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading
+required. Among these strange peoples were goats, as delicately
+colored as a meerschaum pipe, and with the horns of our red deer,
+strange white oxen with humps behind the shoulders, those that are
+exhibited in cages at home as "sacred buffalo," but which here are
+only patient beasts of burden, and gray monkeys, wildcats, snakes
+and crocodiles in cages addressed to "Hagenbeck, Hamburg." The
+freight was no less curious; assegais in bundles, horns stretching
+for three feet from point to point, or rising straight, like
+poignards; skins, ground-nuts, rubber, and heavy blocks of bees-wax
+wrapped in coarse brown sacking, and which in time will burn before
+the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Italy, Spain, and France.
+
+People of the "Bromide" class who run across a friend from their own
+city in Paris will say, "Well, to think of meeting _you_ here. How
+small the world is after all!" If they wish a better proof of how
+really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the
+existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports twenty stores in
+Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not
+the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man
+who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the
+latitudes together and made the world the small department store it
+is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.
+
+The explorer tells you, "I was the first man to climb Kilamajaro."
+"I was the first to cut a path from the shores of Lake Nyassa into
+the Congo Basin." He even lectures about it, in front of a wet sheet
+in the light of a stereopticon, and because he has added some miles
+of territory to the known world, people buy his books and learned
+societies place initials after his distinguished name. But before
+his grandfather was born and long before he ever disturbed the
+waters of Nyassa the Phoenicians and Arabs and Portuguese and men
+of his own time and race had been there before him to buy ivory,
+both white and black, to exchange beads and brass bars and
+shaving-mirrors for the tusks of elephants, raw gold, copra, rubber,
+and the feathers of the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a
+study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its
+way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in
+consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts
+which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But
+that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear
+at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders,
+backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast
+of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships
+faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire
+Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre
+Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being
+planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want
+tires for their automobiles; and because the fashionable ornament of
+the natives of Swaziland is, for no reason, no longer blue-glass
+beads, manufacturers of beads in Switzerland and Italy find
+themselves out of pocket by some thousands and thousands of pounds.
+
+The traders who were making the world smaller by bringing cotton
+prints to Chinde to cover her black nakedness, her British Majesty's
+consul at that port, and the boy lieutenant of the paddle-wheeled
+gunboat which patrols the Zambesi River, were the gentlemen who
+informed me that they were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom
+the _Kanzlar_ might have picked up from a desert island, where they
+had been marooned and left to rot. They observed the gilded glory of
+the _Kanzlar_ smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables,
+with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all
+the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus.
+The boy-commander of the gunboat gazed at white women in the saloon
+with fascinated admiration.
+
+"I have never," he declared, breathlessly, "I have never seen so
+many beautiful women in one place at the same time! I'd forgotten
+that there were so many white people in the world."
+
+"If I stay on board this ship another minute I shall go home," said
+Her Majesty's consul, firmly. "You will have to hold me. It's coming
+over me--I feel it coming. I shall never have the strength to go
+back." He appealed to the sympathetic lieutenant. "Let's desert
+together," he begged.
+
+ [Illustration: One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+ Mozambique.]
+
+In the swamps of the East Coast the white exiles lay aside the
+cloaks and masks of crowded cities. They do not try to conceal their
+feelings, their vices, or their longings. They talk to the first
+white stranger they meet of things which in the great cities a man
+conceals even from his room-mate, and men they would not care to
+know, and whom they would never meet in the fixed social pathways of
+civilization, they take to their hearts as friends. They are too few
+to be particular, they have no choice, and they ask no questions. It
+is enough that the white man, like themselves, is condemned to
+exile. They do not try to find solace in the thought that they are
+the "foretrekkers" of civilization, or take credit to themselves
+because they are the path-finders and the pioneers who bear the heat
+and burden of the day. They are sorry for themselves, because they
+know, more keenly than any outsider can know, how good is the life
+they have given up, and how hard is the one they follow, but they do
+not ask anyone else to be sorry. They would be very much surprised
+if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and
+Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good
+and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.
+
+On the day they boarded the _Kanzlar_ the pains of nostalgia were
+sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves
+of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own
+condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck,
+as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even
+boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess,
+who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.
+
+A little English boy ran through the smoking-room, and they fell
+upon him, and quarrelled for the privilege of holding him on their
+knees. He was a shy, coquettish little English boy, and the
+boisterous, noisy men did not appeal to him. To them he meant home
+and family and the old nursery, papered with colored pictures from
+the Christmas _Graphic_. His stout, bare legs and tangled curls and
+sailor's hat, with "H.M.S. Mars" across it, meant all that was clean
+and sweet-smelling in their past lives.
+
+"I'll arrest you for a deserter," said the lieutenant of the
+gunboat. "I'll make the consul send you back to the _Mars_." He held
+the boy on his knee fearfully, handling him as though he were some
+delicate and precious treasure that might break if he dropped it.
+
+The agent of the Oceanic Development Company, Limited, whose
+business in life is to drive savage Angonis out of the jungle, where
+he hopes in time to see the busy haunts of trade, begged for the boy
+with eloquent pleading.
+
+"You've had the kiddie long enough now," he urged. "Let me have him.
+Come here, Mr. Mars, and sit beside me, and I'll give you fizzy
+water--like lemon-squash, only nicer." He held out a wet bottle of
+champagne alluringly.
+
+"No, he is coming to his consul," that youth declared. "He's coming
+to his consul for protection. You are not fit characters to
+associate with an innocent child. Come to me, little boy, and do not
+listen to those degraded persons." So the "innocent child" seated
+himself between the consul and the chartered trader, and they patted
+his fat calves and red curls and took his minute hands in their
+tanned fists, eying him hungrily, like two cannibals. But the little
+boy was quite unconscious and inconsiderate of their hunger, and,
+with the cruelty of children, pulled himself free and ran away.
+
+"He was such a nice little kiddie," they said, apologetically, as
+though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.
+
+"I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years,"
+said the lieutenant, genially. "But fancy your knowing Sparks! He
+has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and
+he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the
+lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's
+where we hit it off--we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I
+suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down
+here. I know Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to
+talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks
+has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred
+miles."
+
+I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely
+that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and
+spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the
+second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized
+a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were
+sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving
+themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a "disgusting
+practice," and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the
+lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.
+
+"Yes," he said; "and what's worse is that we're here for two years
+more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China.
+Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old,
+and the steamer stops once every month."
+
+ [Illustration: Custom House, Zanzibar.]
+
+Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side,
+so we had time in which to give the exiles the news of the outside
+world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one
+as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy;
+how another had sold "ready to wear" clothes in a New York
+department store, and another had been attaché at Madrid, and
+another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We
+exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would
+meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many
+bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect
+the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.
+
+But at last the ship's whistle blew with raucous persistence. It was
+final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which
+once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages,
+of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and
+flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the
+mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the
+_Kanzlar_ became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon
+line.
+
+I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them
+until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to
+borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with
+never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean
+land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty
+group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was
+more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall
+never meet them again--we had just burned signals as our ships
+passed in the night--and yet, I must always consider among the
+friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways
+straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi,
+"the only respectable members of Chinde Society."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: NOTE--I did not lose the white-clad youths. The
+lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a
+consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde
+newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also,
+should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.
+He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the
+_Kanzlar_, alone prevented his social position being publicly
+recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though
+tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society. R.H.D.]
+
+The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his
+contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one
+which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its
+inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown
+jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the
+captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down
+with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the
+slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the
+casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the
+sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the
+shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the
+harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by
+the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of
+the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom
+this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of
+honor.
+
+ [Illustration: Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar.]
+
+Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great
+slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who
+fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a
+fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison
+and all the inhabitants as well. To-day the slave-trade brings to
+those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but
+the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain,
+and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and
+red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been
+so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has
+taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The
+streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their
+silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day,
+which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no
+footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs.
+The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares
+to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no
+carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and
+refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the
+city, and with the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only
+wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.
+
+I have never visited a city which so impressed one with the fact
+that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred
+years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is,
+on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with
+dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving
+above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city
+of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as
+letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and
+the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy
+curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers
+of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along
+the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great
+blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated
+checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are
+palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and
+churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard
+the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the
+churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty
+stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the
+actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the
+fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous
+period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers,"
+and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within
+its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery,
+when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and
+the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the
+market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of
+bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves
+bought and sold.
+
+In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of
+East Africa from south of Lorenço Marquez to north of Mozambique,
+and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog
+in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to
+help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he
+keeps those who would improve both from gaining any hold or
+influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East
+Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now
+surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack
+of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the
+country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side.
+They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely
+lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats
+they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new
+territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars
+them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth
+undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his café at the coast
+and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the
+native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and
+the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to
+cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them
+no protection.
+
+The land back of Mozambique is divided into "holdings," and the rent
+of each holding is based upon the number of native huts it
+contains. The tax per hut is one pound a year, and these holdings
+are leased to any Portuguese who promises to pay the combined taxes
+of all the huts. He also engages to cut new roads, to keep those
+already made in repair, and to furnish a sufficient number of police
+to maintain order. The lessees of these holdings have given rise to
+many and terrible scandals. In the majority of cases, the lessee,
+once out of reach of all authority and of public opinion, and
+wielding the power of life and death, becomes a tyrant and
+task-master over his district, taxing the natives to five and ten
+times the amount which each is supposed to furnish, and treating
+them virtually as his bondsmen. Up along the Shire River, the
+lessees punish the blacks by hanging them from a tree by their
+ankles and beating their bare backs with rhinoceros hide, until, as
+it has been described to me by a reputable English resident, the
+blood runs in a stream over the negro's shoulders, and forms a pool
+beneath his eyes.
+
+ [Illustration: The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking,
+ Is Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A.]
+
+You hear of no legitimate enterprise fostered by these lessees, of
+no development of natural resources, but, instead, you are told
+tales of sickening cruelty, and you can read in the consular
+reports others quite as true; records of heartless treatment of
+natives, of neglect of great resources, and of hurried snatching at
+the year's crop and a return to the Coast, with nothing to show of
+sustained effort or steady development. The incompetence of Portugal
+cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the
+Boer, she will find the seaport of Lorenço Marquez too necessary to
+her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the
+Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the
+Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African
+Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to
+make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It
+seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little
+kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to
+benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she will
+withdraw from it, in favor of those who are fitter to survive her.
+
+There is no more interesting contrast along the coast of East
+Africa than that presented by the colonies of England, Germany, and
+Portugal. Of these three, the colonies of the Englishmen are, as one
+expects to find them, the healthiest, the busiest, and the most
+prosperous. They thrive under your very eyes; you feel that they
+were established where they are, not by accident, not to gratify a
+national vanity or a ruler's ambition, but with foresight and with
+knowledge, and with the determination to make money; and that they
+will increase and flourish because they are situated where the
+natives and settlers have something to sell, and where the men can
+bring, in return, something the natives and colonials wish to buy.
+Port Elizabeth, Durban, East London, and Zanzibar belong to this
+prosperous class, which gives good reason for the faith of those who
+founded them.
+
+On the other hand, as opposed to these, there are the settlements of
+the Portuguese, rotten and corrupt, and the German settlements of
+Dar Es Salaam and Tanga which have still to prove their right to
+exist. Outwardly, to the eye, they are model settlements. Dar Es
+Salaam, in particular, is a beautiful and perfectly appointed
+colonial town. In the care in which it is laid out, in the
+excellence of its sanitary arrangements, in its cleanliness, and in
+the magnificence of its innumerable official residences, and in
+their sensible adaptability to the needs of the climate, one might
+be deceived into believing that Dar Es Salaam is the beautiful
+gateway of a thriving and busy colony. But there are no ramparts of
+merchandise along her wharves, no bulwarks of strangely scented
+bales blocking her water-front; no lighters push hurriedly from the
+shore to meet the ship, although she is a German ship, or to receive
+her cargo of articles "made in Germany." On the contrary, her
+freight is unloaded at the English ports, and taken on at English
+ports. And the German traders who send their merchandise to Hamburg
+in her hold come over the side at Zanzibar, at Durban, and at Aden,
+where the English merchants find in them fierce competitors. There
+is nothing which goes so far to prove the falsity of the saying that
+"trade follows the flag" as do these model German colonies with
+their barracks, governor's palace, officers' clubs, public pleasure
+parks, and with no trade; and the English colonies, where the German
+merchants remain, and where, under the English flag, they grow
+steadily rich. The German Emperor, believing that colonies are a
+source of strength to an empire, rather than the weakness that they
+are, has raised the German flag in Central East Africa, but the
+ships of the German East African Company, subsidized by him, carry
+their merchandize to the English ports, and his German subjects
+remain where they can make the most money. They do not move to those
+ports where the flag of their country would wave over them.
+
+Dar Es Salaam, although it lacks the one thing needful to make it a
+model settlement, possesses all the other things which are needful,
+and many which are pure luxuries. Its residences, as I have said,
+have been built after the most approved scientific principles of
+ventilation and sanitation. In no tropical country have I seen
+buildings so admirably adapted to the heat and climatic changes and
+at the same time more in keeping with the surrounding scenery. They
+are handsome, cool-looking, white and clean, with broad verandas,
+high walls, and false roofs under which currents of air are lured in
+spite of themselves. The residences are set back along the high bank
+which faces the bay. In front of them is a public promenade, newly
+planted shade-trees arch over it, and royal palms reach up to it
+from the very waters of the harbor. At one end of this semicircle
+are the barracks of the Soudanese soldiers, and at the other is the
+official palace of the governor. Everything in the settlement is
+new, and everything is built on the scale of a city, and with the
+idea of accommodating a great number of people. Hotels and cafés,
+better than any one finds in the older settlements along the coast,
+are arranged on the water-front, and there is a church capable of
+seating the entire white population at one time. If the place is to
+grow, it can do so only through trade, and when trade really comes
+all these palaces and cafés and barracks which occupy the entire
+water-front will have to be pushed back to make way for warehouses
+and custom-house sheds. At present it is populated only by
+officials, and, I believe, twelve white women.
+
+ [Illustration: The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage.]
+
+You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a
+box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this
+beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and
+emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at
+a world's fair as an example of a model village.
+
+In writing of Zanzibar I am embarrassed by the knowledge that I am
+not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first
+sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage
+out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me
+made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.
+
+Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of
+high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand
+at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the
+people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run
+ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass
+of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty
+fortress-like façade before you, and a strip of white sand is at
+your feet.
+
+And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind
+resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack
+in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls
+where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak,
+and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.
+
+In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous,
+unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework,
+windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of
+the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue,
+and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and
+the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East
+African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering
+walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either
+actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and
+glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him;
+the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their
+children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and
+bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you
+with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare
+shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows
+dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long
+and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of
+richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces
+of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts,
+and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of
+the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it
+is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.
+
+The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think
+Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in
+your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a
+vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of
+Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it
+healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection
+for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm
+government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of
+this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb
+of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous
+life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but
+they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at
+all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does
+in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in
+Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers
+alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so
+infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for
+those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly
+for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.
+
+ [Illustration: H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan
+ of Zanzibar.]
+
+Zanzibar is an "Arabian Nights" city, a comic-opera capital, a most
+difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any
+house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and
+decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel
+sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe
+walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a
+carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing
+will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that
+the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the
+next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will
+prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.
+
+Several hundred years ago the Sultans of Zanzibar grew powerful and
+wealthy through exporting slaves and ivory from the mainland. These
+were not two separate industries, but one was developed by the other
+and was dependent upon it. The procedure was brutally simple. A
+slave-trader, having first paid his tribute to the Sultan, crossed
+to the mainland, and marching into the interior made his bargain
+with one of the local chiefs for so much ivory, and for so many men
+to carry it down to the coast. Without some such means of transport
+there could have been no bargain, so the chief who was anxious to
+sell would select a village which had not paid him the taxes due
+him, and bid the trader help himself to what men he found there.
+Then would follow a hideous night attack, a massacre of women and
+children, and the taking prisoners of all able-bodied males. These
+men, chained together in long lines, and each bearing a heavy tooth
+of ivory upon his shoulder, would be whipped down to the coast. It
+was only when they had carried the ivory there, and their work was
+finished, that the idea presented itself of selling them as well as
+the ivory. Later, these bearers became of equal value with the
+ivory, and the raiding of native villages and the capture of men and
+women to be sold into slavery developed into a great industry. The
+industry continues fitfully to-day, but it is carried on under great
+difficulties, and at a risk of heavy punishments. What is called
+"domestic slavery" is recognized on the island of Zanzibar, the vast
+clove plantations which lie back of the port employing many hundreds
+of these domestic slaves. It is not to free these from their slight
+bondage that the efforts of those who are trying to suppress the
+slave-trade is to-day directed, but to prevent others from being
+added to their number. What slave-trading there is at present is by
+Arabs and Indians. They convey the slaves in dhows from the mainland
+to Madagascar, Arabia, or southern Persia, and to the Island of
+Pemba, which lies north of Zanzibar, and only fifteen miles from the
+mainland. If a slave can be brought this short distance in safety he
+can be sold for five hundred dollars; on the mainland he is not
+worth more than fifteen dollars. The channels, and the mouths of
+rivers, and the little bays opening from the Island of Pemba are
+patrolled more or less regularly by British gunboats, and junior
+officers in charge of a cutter and a crew of half a dozen men, are
+detached from these for a few months at a time on "boat service." It
+seems to be an unprofitable pursuit, for one officer told me that
+during his month of boat service he had boarded and searched three
+hundred dhows, which is an average of ten a day, and found slaves on
+only one of them. But as, on this occasion, he rescued four slaves,
+and the slavers, moreover, showed fight, and wounded him and two of
+his boat's crew, he was more than satisfied.
+
+The trade in ivory, which has none of these restrictions upon it,
+still flourishes, and the cool, dark warerooms of Zanzibar are
+stored high with it. In a corner of one little cellar they showed
+us twenty-five thousand dollars worth of these tusks piled up as
+carelessly as though they were logs in a wood-shed. One of the most
+curious sights in Zanzibar is a line of Zanzibari boys, each
+balancing a great tusk on his shoulder, worth from five hundred to
+two thousand dollars, and which is unprotected except for a piece of
+coarse sacking.
+
+ [Illustration: A German "Factory" at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+ Living Apartments Above.]
+
+The largest exporters of ivory in the world are at Zanzibar, and
+though probably few people know it, the firm which carries on this
+business belongs to New York City, and has been in the ivory trade
+with India and Africa from as far back as the fifties. In their
+house at Zanzibar they have entertained every distinguished African
+explorer, and the stories its walls have heard of native wars,
+pirate dhows, slave-dealers, the English occupation, and terrible
+marches through the jungles of the Congo, would make valuable and
+picturesque history. The firm has always held a semi-official
+position, for the reason that the United States Consul at Zanzibar,
+who should speak at least Swahili and Portuguese, is invariably
+chosen for the post from a drug-store in Yankton, Dakota, or a
+post-office in Canton, Ohio. Consequently, on arriving at Zanzibar
+he becomes homesick, and his first official act is to cable his
+resignation, and the State Department instructs whoever happens to
+be general manager of the ivory house to perform the duties of
+acting-consul. So, the ivory house has nearly always held the eagle
+of the consulate over its doorway. The manager of the ivory house,
+who at the time of our visit was also consul, is Harris Robbins
+Childs. Mr. Childs is well known in New York City, is a member of
+many clubs there, and speaks at least five languages. He understands
+the native tongue of Zanzibar so well that when the Prime Minister
+of the Sultan took us to the palace to pay our respects, Childs
+talked the language so much better than did the Sultan's own Prime
+Minister that there was in consequence much joking and laughing. The
+Sultan then was a most dignified, intelligent, and charming old
+gentleman. He was popular both with his own people, who loved him
+with a religious fervor, and with the English, who unobtrusively
+conducted his affairs.
+
+There have been sultans who have acted less wisely than does Hamud
+bin Muhamad bin Said. A few years ago one of these, Said Khaled,
+defied the British Empire as represented by several gunboats, and
+dared them to fire on his ship of war, a tramp steamer which he had
+converted into a royal yacht. The gunboats were anchored about two
+hundred yards from the palace, which stands at the water's edge, and
+at the time agreed upon, they sank the Sultan's ship of war in the
+short space of three minutes, and in a brief bombardment destroyed
+the greater part of his palace. The ship of war still rests where
+she sank, and her topmasts peer above the water only three hundred
+yards distant from the windows of the new palace. They serve as a
+constant warning to all future sultans.
+
+The new palace is of somewhat too modern architecture, and is not
+nearly as dignified as are the massive white walls of the native
+houses which surround it. But within it is a fairy palace, hung with
+silk draperies, tapestries, and hand-painted curtains; the floors
+are covered with magnificent rugs from Persia and India, and the
+reception-room is crowded with treasures of ebony, ivory, lacquer
+work, and gold and silver. There were two thrones made of silver
+dragons, with many scales, and studded with jewels. The Sultan did
+not seem to mind our openly admiring his treasures, and his
+attendants, who stood about him in gorgeous-colored silks heavy with
+gold embroideries, were evidently pleased with the deep impression
+they made upon the visitors. The Sultan was very gentle and
+courteous and human, especially in the pleasure he took over his son
+and heir, who then was at school in England, and who, on the death
+of his father, succeeded him. He seemed very much gratified when we
+suggested that there was no better training-place for a boy than an
+English public school; as Americans, he thought our opinion must be
+unprejudiced. Before he sent us away, he gave Childs, and each of
+us, a photograph of himself, one of which is reproduced in this
+book.
+
+Our next port was the German settlement of Tanga. We arrived there
+just as a blood-red sun was setting behind great and gloomy
+mountains. The place itself was bathed in damp hot vapors, and
+surrounded even to the water's edge by a steaming jungle. It was
+more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we
+had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a
+trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the
+evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp
+three lions had kept him awake until morning.
+
+ [Illustration: Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+ Tanga.]
+
+The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports. We saw them
+only through field-glasses from the ship's side, so that there is,
+in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of
+Africa. But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the
+Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has passed
+away. It was certainly worth taking once. If I have failed to make
+that apparent, the fault lies with the writer. It is certainly not
+the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that
+"sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue," or of the
+exiles and "remittance men," or of the engineers who are building
+the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest
+which the East Coast presents in its problem of trade, of conquest,
+and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Congo and Coasts of Africa
+by Richard Harding Davis
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14297 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14297 ***</div>
+
+<a name="img1" id="img1"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-01.jpg" width="500" height="338" alt="Mr. Davis and &quot;Wood Boys&quot; of the Congo." title="Mr. Davis and &quot;Wood Boys&quot; of the Congo." />
+</div>
+<p class="cap">Mr. Davis and &quot;Wood Boys&quot; of the Congo. </p>
+<hr />
+
+<h1>THE CONGO AND</h1>
+<h1> COASTS OF AFRICA</h1>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>RICHARD HARDING DAVIS, <small>F.R.G.S.</small></h2>
+
+
+<p class="center"><small>AUTHOR OF &quot;SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE,&quot; &quot;THE SCARLET CAR,&quot; <br />&quot;WITH BOTH
+ARMIES IN SOUTH AFRICA,&quot; &quot;FARCES,&quot; &quot;THE CUBAN<br /> AND PORTO RICAN
+CAMPAIGNS&quot;</small></p>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<h4>ILLUSTRATIONS<br />
+FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR<br />
+AND OTHERS</h4>
+
+<br />
+
+<h5>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+NEW YORK<br />
+1907</h5>
+
+<hr />
+
+
+
+
+<h5>TO</h5>
+<h4>CECIL CLARK DAVIS</h4>
+
+<h5>MY FELLOW VOYAGER ALONG<br />
+THE COASTS OF AFRICA</h5>
+
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="8" summary="contents">
+<tr><td align='center'><b>i</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#I">The Coasters</a></td><td align='right'>3</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>ii</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#II">My Brother's Keeper</a></td><td align='right'>32</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>iii</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#III">The Capital of the Congo</a></td><td align='right'>55</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>iv</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#IV">Americans in the Congo</a></td><td align='right'>93</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>v</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#V">Hunting the Hippo</a></td><td align='right'>118</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>vi</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#VI">Old Calabar</a></td><td align='right'>142</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>vii</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#VII">Along the East Coast</a></td><td align='right'>176</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<br />
+
+<hr class="short" />
+
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<a href="#img1"> R. Davis and "Wood Boys" of the Congo</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Frontispiece</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+  <a href="#img2"> Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed "Hammock," The Local Means
+     of Transport on the West Coast</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+ <a href="#img3">A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+     Whitewashed Stove at White Heat</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<a href="#img4">The "Mammy Chair" is Like Those Swings You See
+     in Public Playgrounds</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<a href="#img5">A Village on the Kasai River</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<a href="#img6">"Tenants" of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+     Belongs to Him, and that these Native People
+     are there only as His Tenants</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img7">The Facilities for Landing At Banana, the Port of
+     Entry to the Congo, are Limited</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+  <a href="#img8"> "Prisoners" of the State in Chains at Matadi</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+  <a href="#img9"> Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img10">The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, Not to
+   Stanley, but to Leopold</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img11">The <i>Deliverance</i>. 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</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img12">The Native Wife of a <i>Chef de Poste</i></a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img13">English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img14">The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American Concessionaires
+     Must Depend</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img15">Mr. Davis and Native "Boy," on the Kasai River</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img16">The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img17">The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img18">There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+     Pounding against Each Other</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img19">A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img20">The Palace of the King of the Cameroons</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img21">The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img22">The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+     Their Converts at Old Calabar</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img23">The Kroo Boys Sit, not on the Thwarts, but on the
+     Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img24">Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img25">One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+     Mozambique</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img26">Custom House, Zanzibar</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img27">Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img28">The Ivory on the Right, Covered only with Sacking,
+     is Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A.</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img29">The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img30">H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late
+     Sultan of Zanzibar</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img31">A German "Factory" at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+     Living Apartments Above</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img32">Soudanese Soldiers under a German Officer Outside
+    of Tanga</a>
+</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<hr />
+
+<br />
+
+
+<h3>THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA</h3>
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a>[3]</span>
+
+
+<h3>THE COASTERS</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>No matter how often one sets out, &quot;for to admire, and for to see,
+for to behold this world so wide,&quot; he never quite gets over being
+surprised at the erratic manner in which &quot;civilization&quot; 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
+&quot;influences of civilization&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>When a stone falls in a pool each part of each ripple is equally
+distant from the spot <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a>[4]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a>[5]</span>
+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 &quot;first families&quot; 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, &quot;the Gold Coast, the Ivory
+Coast, the Bight of Benin, and Old Calabar.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a>[6]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;factories,&quot; as they call their trading houses, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>[7]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>As our tender came alongside the <i>Bruxellesville</i> at Southampton, we
+saw at the winch Kroo boys of the Ivory Coast; leaning over the rail
+the S&oelig;urs 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 &quot;Coasters,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly every one of our passengers from Antwerp or Southampton knows
+that if he <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a>[8]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span>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 caf&eacute;s 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span>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 &quot;<i>U.S.S. Iowa</i>&quot; on the
+band to be quite familiar. Their secret <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span>is that they are built to
+support baskets and buckets of water, and that concealed in each is
+a heavy pad.</p>
+
+<a name="img2" id="img2"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-02.jpg" width="500" height="321" alt="Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed &quot;Hammock,&quot; the Local Means
+of Transport on the West Coast." title="Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed &quot;Hammock,&quot; the Local Means
+of Transport on the West Coast."  />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed &quot;Hammock,&quot; the Local Means
+of Transport on the West Coast. </p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span>Equator to-day as it
+did a thousand years ago, in inaccessible, inhospitable isolation.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span>harbor of Grand Bassam: &quot;I've seen
+just as much cargo lost overboard in that surf as I've seen shipped
+to Europe.&quot; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span>for little pay, that every foot of the West Coast
+is pre&euml;mpted. 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 &quot;protect&quot; that swamp; some
+treaty is filed as a title-deed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;a thin red line&quot; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The raids made upon the West Coast to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span>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 &quot;the fortress of Gibraltar, the Island of Minorca,
+and the monopoly in the slave trade for thirty years,&quot; or, as it was
+called, the <i>asiento</i> (contract). This was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span>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. &quot;After,&quot; he writes, &quot;going every day on shore to take the
+inhabitants by burning and despoiling of their towns,&quot; the ship was
+becalmed. &quot;But,&quot; he adds gratefully, &quot;the Almighty God, who never
+suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the breeze.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The slave book shows that as late as 1780 others of the &quot;elect&quot; of
+our own South were publishing advertisements like this, which is one
+of the shortest and mildest. It is from a Virginia newspaper: &quot;The
+said fellow is outlawed, and I will give ten pounds reward for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span>his
+head severed from his body, or forty shillings if brought alive.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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: &quot;What is all this declamation
+about human beings! This is a case of chattels or goods. It is
+really so&mdash;it is the case of throwing over goods. For the
+purpose&mdash;the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property;
+whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>As early as 1718 Raynal and Diderot estimated that up to that time
+there had been exported from Africa to the North and South <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Merchant
+Adventurers,&quot; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;fires in the forests, the beating of drums, and strange
+cries that issued from the bushes,&quot; 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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span>After the fifteenth century, in a succession of failures, five
+different companies of &quot;Royal Adventurers&quot; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Sierra Leone, as originally purchased in 1786, consisted of twenty
+square miles, for which among other articles of equal value King
+Naimbanna received a &quot;crimson satin embroidered waistcoat, one
+puncheon of rum, ten pounds of beads, two cheeses, one box of
+smoking pipes, a mock diamond ring, and a tierce of pork.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>What first impressed me about Sierra Leone was the heat. It does not
+permit one to give his attention wholly to anything else. I always
+have maintained that the hottest place on earth is New York, and I
+have been in other places with more than a local reputation for
+heat; some along the Equator, Louren&ccedil;o Marquez, which is only
+prevented from being an earthen oven because it is a swamp; the Red
+Sea, with a following breeze, and from both shores the baked heat of
+the desert, and Nagasaki, on a rainy day in midsummer.</p>
+
+<p>But New York in August radiating stored-up <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span>heat from iron-framed
+buildings, with the foul, dead air shut in by the skyscrapers, with
+a humidity that makes you think you are breathing through a
+steam-heated sponge, is as near the lower regions as I hope any of
+us will go. And yet Sierra Leone is no mean competitor.</p>
+
+<p>We climbed the moss-covered steps to the quay to face a great white
+building that blazed like the base of a whitewashed stove at white
+heat. Before it were some rusty cannon and a canoe cut out of a
+single tree, and, seated upon it selling fruit and sun-dried fish,
+some native women, naked to the waist, their bodies streaming with
+palm oil and sweat. At the same moment something struck me a blow on
+the top of the head, at the base of the spine and between the
+shoulder blades, and the ebony ladies and the white &quot;factory&quot; were
+burnt up in a scroll of flame.</p>
+
+<a name="img3" id="img3"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-03.jpg" width="500" height="326" alt="A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+Whitewashed Stove at White Heat." title="A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+Whitewashed Stove at White Heat." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+Whitewashed Stove at White Heat. </p>
+
+<p>I heard myself in a far-away voice asking where one could buy a sun
+helmet and a white umbrella, and until I was under their protection,
+Sierra Leone interested me no more.</p>
+
+<p>One sees more different kinds of black people in Sierra Leone than
+in any other port <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span>along the Coast; Senegalese and Senegambians,
+Kroo boys, Liberians, naked bush boys bearing great burdens from the
+forests, domestic slaves in fez and colored linen livery, carrying
+hammocks swung from under a canopy, the local electric hansom,
+soldiers of the W.A.F.F., the West African Frontier Force, in Zouave
+uniform of scarlet and khaki, with bare legs; Arabs from as far in
+the interior as Timbuctu, yellow in face and in long silken robes;
+big fat &quot;mammies&quot; in well-washed linen like the washerwomen of
+Jamaica, each balancing on her head her tightly rolled umbrella, and
+in the gardens slim young girls, with only a strip of blue and white
+linen from the waist to the knees, lithe, erect, with glistening
+teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission
+schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms.
+Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the
+tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public
+schools operated by the government as well as many others run by
+American and English missions, a club where the white &quot;mammies,&quot; as
+all women are called, and the white officers&mdash;for Sierra <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span>Leone is a
+coaling station on the Cape route to India, and is garrisoned
+accordingly&mdash;play croquet, and bowl into a net.</p>
+
+<p>When the officers are not bowling they are tramping into the
+hinterland after tribes on the warpath from Liberia, and coming
+back, perhaps wounded or racked with fever, or perhaps they do not
+come back. On the day we landed they had just buried one of the
+officers. On Saturday afternoon he had been playing tennis, during
+the night the fever claimed him, and Sunday night he was dead.</p>
+
+<p>That night as we pulled out to the steamer there came toward us in
+black silhouette against the sun, setting blood-red into the lagoon,
+two great canoes. They were coming from up the river piled high with
+fruit and bark, with the women and children lying huddled in the
+high bow and stern, while amidships the twelve men at the oars
+strained and struggled until we saw every muscle rise under the
+black skin.</p>
+
+<p>As their stroke slackened, the man in the bow with the tom-tom beat
+more savagely upon it, and shouted to them in shrill sharp cries.
+Their eyes shone, their teeth clenched, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span>the sweat streamed from
+their naked bodies. They might have been slaves chained to the
+thwarts of a trireme.</p>
+
+<p>Just ahead of them lay at anchor the only other ship beside our own
+in port, a two-masted schooner, the <i>Gladys E. Wilden</i>, out of
+Boston. Her captain leaned upon the rail smoking his cigar, his
+shirt-sleeves held up with pink elastics, on the back of his head a
+derby hat. As the rowers passed under his bows he looked critically
+at the streaming black bodies and spat meditatively into the water.
+His own father could have had them between decks as cargo. Now for
+the petroleum and lumber he brings from Massachusetts to Sierra
+Leone he returns in ballast.</p>
+
+<p>Because her lines were so home-like and her captain came from Cape
+Cod, we wanted to call on the <i>Gladys E. Wilden</i>, but our own
+captain had different views, and the two ships passed in the night,
+and the man from Boston never will know that two folks from home
+were burning signals to him.</p>
+
+<p>Because our next port of call, Grand Bassam, is the chief port of
+the French Ivory Coast, which is 125,000 square miles in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span>extent, we
+expected quite a flourishing seaport. Instead, Grand Bassam was a
+bank of yellow sand, a dozen bungalows in a line, a few wind-blown
+cocoanut palms, an iron pier, and a French flag. Beyond the cocoanut
+palms we could see a great lagoon, and each minute a wave leaped
+roaring upon the yellow sand-bank and tried to hurl itself across
+it, eating up the bungalows on its way, into the quiet waters of the
+lake. Each time we were sure it would succeed, but the yellow bank
+stood like rock, and, beaten back, the wave would rise in white
+spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the
+sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet
+of the bungalows.</p>
+
+<p>We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who
+had come out to join her husband. His factory is a two days' launch
+ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not
+speak English. Her husband had wished her, for her health's sake, to
+stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and
+against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had
+at once set out to join him. She was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span>a very pretty, sad, unsmiling
+young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband's partner
+questions about the new home. His answers, while they did not seem
+to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained
+safely in her London suburb.</p>
+
+<p>Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron
+pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her.</p>
+
+<p>The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and
+shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes
+staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow,
+another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the
+partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in
+white under the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>The husband and the young wife were swung together over the side to
+the lifting waves in a two-seated &quot;mammy chair,&quot; like one of those
+<i>vis-&agrave;-vis</i> swings you see in public playgrounds and picnic groves,
+and they carried with them, as a gift from Captain Burton, a fast
+melting lump of ice, the last piece of fresh meat they will taste in
+many a day, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span>the blessings of all the ship's company. And then,
+with inhospitable haste there was a rattle of anchor chains, a quick
+jangle of bells from the bridge to the engine-room, and the
+<i>Bruxellesville</i> swept out to sea, leaving the girl from the London
+suburb to find her way into the heart of Africa. Next morning we
+anchored in a dripping fog off Sekondi on the Gold Coast, to allow
+an English doctor to find his way to a fever camp. For nine years he
+had been a Coaster, and he had just gone home to fit himself, by a
+winter's vacation in London, for more work along the Gold Coast. It
+is said of him that he has &quot;never lost a life.&quot; On arriving in
+London he received a cable telling him three doctors had died, the
+miners along the railroad to Ashanti were rotten with fever, and
+that he was needed.</p>
+
+<a name="img4" id="img4"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 453px;">
+<img src="images/img-04.jpg" width="453" height="450" alt="The &quot;Mammy Chair&quot; is Like Those Swings You See in
+Public Playgrounds." title="The &quot;Mammy Chair&quot; is Like Those Swings You See in
+Public Playgrounds." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The &quot;Mammy Chair&quot; is Like Those Swings You See in
+Public Playgrounds. </p>
+
+<p>So he and his wife, as cheery and bright as though she were setting
+forth on her honeymoon, were going back to take up the white man's
+burden. We swung them over the side as we had the other two, and
+that night in the smoking-room the Coasters drank &quot;Luck to him,&quot;
+which, in the vernacular of this unhealthy shore, means &quot;Life to
+him,&quot; and to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span>the plucky, jolly woman who was going back to fight
+death with the man who had never lost a life.</p>
+
+<p>As the ship was getting under way, a young man in &quot;whites&quot; and a sun
+helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by
+which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled
+recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his
+helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt;
+that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for
+he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding
+as though we had been old acquaintances.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You going far?&quot; he asked. He spoke in the soft, detached voice of
+the public-school Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the Congo,&quot; I answered.</p>
+
+<p>He stood swaying with the ship, looking as though there were
+something he wished to say, and then laughed, and added gravely,
+giving me the greeting of the Coast: &quot;Luck to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Luck to YOU,&quot; I said.</p>
+
+<p>That is the worst of these gaddings about, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span>these meetings with men
+you wish you could know, who pass like a face in the crowded street,
+who hold out a hand, or give the password of the brotherhood, and
+then drop down the sea ladder and out of your life forever.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<a name="II" id="II"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span>
+
+<h3>MY BROTHER'S KEEPER</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>To me, the fact of greatest interest about the Congo is that it is
+owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned by
+one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not
+trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that
+in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it.
+Though backed by all the mailed fists in the German Empire, and all
+the <i>Dreadnoughts</i> of the seas, no other modern monarch would make
+such a claim. It does not sound like anything we have heard since
+the days and the ways of Pharaoh. And the most remarkable feature of
+it is, that the man who makes this claim is the man who was placed
+over the Congo as a guardian, to keep it open to the trade of the
+world, to suppress slavery. That, in the Congo, he has killed trade
+and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span>made the products of the land his own, that of the natives he
+did not kill he has made slaves, is what to-day gives the Congo its
+chief interest. It is well to emphasize how this one man stole a
+march on fourteen Powers, including the United States, and stole
+also an empire of one million square miles.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-five years ago all of Africa was divided into many parts. The
+part which still remained to be distributed among the Powers was
+that which was watered by the Congo River and its tributaries.</p>
+
+<p>Along the north bank of the Congo River ran the French Congo; the
+Portuguese owned the lands to the south, and on the east it was shut
+in by protectorates and colonies of Germany and England. It was, and
+is, a territory as large, were Spain and Russia omitted, as Europe.
+Were a map of the Congo laid upon a map of Europe, with the mouth of
+the Congo River where France and Spain meet at Biarritz, the
+boundaries of the Congo would reach south to the heel of Italy, to
+Greece, to Smyrna; east to Constantinople and Odessa; northeast to
+St. Petersburg and Finland, and northwest to the extreme limits of
+Scotland. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span>Distances in this country are so enormous, the means of
+progress so primitive, that many of the Belgian officers with whom I
+came south and who already had travelled nineteen days from Antwerp,
+had still, before they reached their posts, to steam, paddle, and
+walk for three months.</p>
+
+<p>In 1844 to dispose amicably of this great territory, which was much
+desired by several of the Powers, a conference was held at Berlin.
+There it was decided to make of the Congo Basin an Independent
+State, a &quot;free-for-all&quot; country, where every flag could trade with
+equal right, and with no special tariff or restriction.</p>
+
+<p>The General Act of this conference agreed: &quot;The trade of ALL nations
+shall enjoy complete freedom.&quot; &quot;No Power which exercises or shall
+exercise Sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions shall be
+allowed to <i>grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters
+of trade</i>.&quot; &quot;ALL the Powers exercising Sovereign rights or influence
+in the afore-said territories bind themselves to watch over the
+preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement
+of <i>the condition of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span>their moral and material welfare</i>, and <i>to
+help in suppressing slavery</i>.&quot; The italics are mine. These
+quotations from the act are still binding upon the fourteen Powers,
+including the United States.</p>
+
+<p>For several years previous to the Conference of Berlin, Leopold of
+Belgium, as a private individual, had shown much interest in the
+development of the Congo. The opening up of that territory was
+apparently his hobby. Out of his own pocket he paid for expeditions
+into the Congo Basin, employed German and English explorers, and
+protested against the then existing iniquities of the Arabs, who for
+ivory and slaves raided the Upper Congo. Finally, assisted by many
+geographical societies, he founded the International Association, to
+promote &quot;civilization and trade&quot; in Central Africa; and enlisted
+Henry M. Stanley in this service.</p>
+
+<p>That, in the early years, Leopold's interest in the Congo was
+unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now
+know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most
+unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span>may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented
+himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of
+administrator of this new territory.</p>
+
+<p>On the face of it he seemed an admirable choice. He was a sovereign
+of a kingdom too unimportant to be feared; of the newly created
+State he undoubtedly possessed an intimate knowledge. He promised to
+give to the Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders, already for many
+years established on the Congo, his heartiest aid, and, for those
+traders still to come, to maintain the &quot;open door.&quot; His professions
+of a desire to help the natives were profuse. He became the
+unanimous choice of the conference.</p>
+
+<p>Later he announced to the Powers signing the act, that from Belgium
+he had received the right to assume the title of King of the
+Independent State of the Congo. The Powers recognized his new title.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that Leopold, King of Belgium, was king also of the &Eacute;tat
+Ind&eacute;pendant du Congo confused many into thinking that the Free State
+was a colony, or under the protection, of Belgium. As we have seen,
+it is not. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span>A Belgian may serve in the army of the Free State, or in
+a civil capacity, as may a man of any nation, but, although with few
+exceptions only Belgians are employed in the Free State, and
+although to help the King in the Congo, the Belgian Government has
+loaned him great sums of money, politically and constitutionally the
+two governments are as independent of each other as France and
+Spain.</p>
+
+<p>And so, in 1885, Leopold, by the grace of fourteen governments, was
+appointed their steward over a great estate in which each of the
+governments still holds an equal right; a trustee and keeper over
+twenty millions of &quot;black brothers&quot; whose &quot;moral and material
+welfare&quot; each government had promised to protect.</p>
+
+<p>There is only one thing more remarkable than the fact that Leopold
+was able to turn this public market into a private park, and that
+is, that he has been permitted to do so. It is true he is a man of
+wonderful ability. For his own ends he is a magnificent organizer.
+But in the fourteen governments that created him there have been,
+and to-day there are, men, if less unscrupulous, of quite as great
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span>ability; statesmen, jealous and quick to guard the rights of the
+people they represent, people who since the twelfth century have
+been traders, who since 1808 have declared slavery abolished.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, for twenty-five years these statesmen have watched Leopold
+disobey every provision in the act of the conference. Were they to
+visit the Congo, they could see for themselves the jungle creeping
+in and burying their trading posts, their great factories turned
+into barracks. They know that the blacks they mutually agreed to
+protect have been reduced to slavery worse than that they suffered
+from the Arabs, that hundreds of thousands of them have fled from
+the Congo, and that those that remain have been mutilated, maimed,
+or, what was more merciful, murdered. And yet the fourteen
+governments, including the United States, have done nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Some tell you they do not interfere because they are jealous one of
+the other; others say that it is because they believe the Congo will
+soon be taken over by Belgium, and with Belgium in control, they
+argue, they would be dealing with a responsible government, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span>instead
+of with a pirate. But so long as Leopold is King of Belgium one
+doubts if Belgians in the Congo would rise above the level of their
+King. The English, when asked why they do not assert their rights,
+granted not only to them, but to thirteen other governments, reply
+that if they did they would be accused of &quot;ulterior motives.&quot; What
+ulterior motives? If you pursue a pickpocket and recover your watch
+from him, are your motives in doing so open to suspicion?</p>
+
+<p>Personally, although this is looking some way ahead, I would like to
+see the English take over and administrate the Congo. Wherever I
+visit a colony governed by Englishmen I find under their
+administration, in spite of opium in China and gin on the West
+Coast, that three people are benefited: the Englishman, the native,
+and the foreign trader from any other part of the world. Of the
+colonies of what other country can one say the same?</p>
+
+<p>As a rule our present governments are not loath to protect their
+rights. But toward asserting them in the Congo they have been moved
+neither by the protests of traders, chambers of commerce,
+missionaries, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span>public press, nor by the cry of the black man to
+&quot;let my people go.&quot; By only those in high places can it be
+explained. We will leave it as a curious fact, and return to the
+&quot;Unjust Steward.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His first act was to wage wars upon the Arabs. From the Soudan and
+from the East Coast they were raiding the Congo for slaves and
+ivory, and he drove them from it. By these wars he accomplished two
+things. As the defender of the slave, he gained much public credit,
+and he kept the ivory. But war is expensive, and soon he pointed out
+to the Powers that to ask him out of his own pocket to maintain
+armies in the field and to administer a great estate was unfair. He
+humbly sought their permission to levy a few taxes. It seemed a
+reasonable request. To clear roads, to keep boats upon the great
+rivers, to mark it with buoys, to maintain wood stations for the
+steamers, to improve the &quot;moral and material welfare of the
+natives,&quot; would cost money, and to allow Leopold to bring about
+these improvements, which would be for the good of all, he was
+permitted to levy the few taxes. That was twenty years ago; to-day I
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span>saw none of these improvements, and the taxes have increased.</p>
+
+<p>From the first they were so heavy that the great trade houses, which
+for one hundred years in peace and mutual goodwill bartered with the
+natives, found themselves ruined. It was not alone the export taxes,
+lighterage dues, port dues, and personal taxes that drove them out
+of the Congo; it was the King appearing against them as a rival
+trader, the man appointed to maintain the &quot;open door.&quot; And a trader
+with methods they could not or would not imitate. Leopold, or the
+&quot;State,&quot; saw for the existence of the Congo only two reasons: Rubber
+and Ivory. And the collecting of this rubber and ivory was, as he
+saw it, the sole duty of the State and its officers. When he threw
+over the part of trustee and became the Arab raider he could not
+waste his time, which, he had good reason to fear, might be short,
+upon products that, if fostered, would be of value only in later
+years. Still less time had he to give to improvements that cost
+money and that would be of benefit to his successors. He wanted only
+rubber; he wanted it at once, and he cared not at all how <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span>he
+obtained it. So he spun, and still spins, the greatest of all
+&quot;get-rich-quick&quot; schemes; one of gigantic proportions, full of
+tragic, monstrous, nauseous details.</p>
+
+<p>The only possible way to obtain rubber is through the native; as
+yet, in teeming forests, the white man can not work and live. Of
+even Chinese coolies imported here to build a railroad ninety per
+cent. died. So, with a stroke of the pen, Leopold declared all the
+rubber in the country the property of the &quot;State,&quot; and then, to make
+sure that the natives would work it, ordered that taxes be paid in
+rubber. If, once a month (in order to keep the natives steadily at
+work the taxes were ordered to be paid each month instead of once a
+year), each village did not bring in so many baskets of rubber the
+King's cannibal soldiers raided it, carried off the women as
+hostages, and made prisoners of the men, or killed and ate them. For
+every kilo of rubber brought in in excess of the quota the King's
+agent, who received the collected rubber and forwarded it down the
+river, was paid a commission. Or was &quot;paid by results.&quot; Another
+bonus was given him based on the price at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span>which he obtained the
+rubber. If he paid the native only six cents for every two pounds,
+he received a bonus of three cents, the cost to the State being but
+nine cents per kilo, but, if he paid the natives twelve cents for
+every two pounds, he received as a bonus less than one cent. In a
+word, the more rubber the agent collected the more he personally
+benefited, and if he obtained it &quot;cheaply&quot; or for nothing&mdash;that is,
+by taking hostages, making prisoners, by the whip of hippopotamus
+hide, by torture&mdash;so much greater his fortune, so much richer
+Leopold.</p>
+
+<a name="img5" id="img5"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-05.jpg" width="500" height="302" alt="A Village on the Kasai River." title="A Village on the Kasai River." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">A Village on the Kasai River. </p>
+
+<p>Few schemes devised have been more cynical, more devilish, more
+cunningly designed to incite a man to cruelty and abuse. To
+dishonesty it was an invitation and a reward. It was this system of
+&quot;payment by results,&quot; evolved by Leopold sooner than allow his
+agents a fixed and sufficient wage, that led to the atrocities.</p>
+
+<p>One result of this system was that in seven years the natives
+condemned to slavery in the rubber forests brought in rubber to the
+amount of fifty-five millions of dollars. But its chief results were
+the destruction of entire villages, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span>the flight from their homes in
+the Congo of hundreds of thousands of natives, and for those that
+remained misery, death, the most brutal tortures and degradations,
+unprintable, unthinkable.</p>
+
+<p>I am not going to enter into the question of the atrocities. In the
+Congo the tip has been given out from those higher up at Brussels to
+&quot;close up&quot; the atrocities; and for the present the evil places in
+the Tenderloin and along the Broadway of the Congo are tightly shut.
+But at those lonely posts, distant a month to three months' march
+from the capital, the cruelties still continue. I did not see them.
+Neither, last year, did a great many people in the United States see
+the massacre of blacks in Atlanta. But they have reason to believe
+it occurred. And after one has talked with the men and women who
+have seen the atrocities, has seen in the official reports that
+those accused of the atrocities do not deny having committed them,
+but point out that they were merely obeying orders, and after one
+has seen that even at the capital of Boma all the conditions of
+slavery exist, one is assured that in the jungle, away from the
+sight of men, all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span>things are possible. Merchants, missionaries, and
+officials even in Leopold's service told me that if one could spare
+a year and a half, or a year, to the work in the hinterland he would
+be an eye-witness of as cruel treatment of the natives as any that
+has gone before, and if I can trust myself to weigh testimony and
+can believe my eyes and ears I have reason to know that what they
+say is true. I am convinced that to-day a man, who feels that a year
+and a half is little enough to give to the aid of twenty millions of
+human beings, can accomplish in the Congo as great and good work as
+that of the Abolitionists.</p>
+
+<p>Three years ago atrocities here were open and above-board. For
+instance. In the opinion of the State the soldiers, in killing game
+for food, wasted the State cartridges, and in consequence the
+soldiers, to show their officers that they did not expend the
+cartridges extravagantly on antelope and wild boar, for each empty
+cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or
+child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts
+along the river. They are no longer in evidence. Neither is the
+flower-bed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span>of Lieutenant Dom, which was bordered with human skulls.
+A quaint conceit.</p>
+
+<p>The man to blame for the atrocities, for each separate atrocity, is
+Leopold. Had he shaken his head they would have ceased. When the hue
+and cry in Europe grew too hot for him and he held up his hand they
+did cease. At least along the main waterways. Years before he could
+have stopped them. But these were the seven fallow years, when
+millions of tons of red rubber were being dumped upon the wharf at
+Antwerp; little, roughly rolled red balls, like pellets of
+coagulated blood, which had cost their weight in blood, which would
+pay Leopold their weight in gold.</p>
+
+<p>He can not plead ignorance. Of all that goes on in his big
+plantation no man has a better knowledge. Without their personal
+honesty, he follows every detail of the &quot;business&quot; of his rubber
+farm with the same diligence that made rich men of George Boldt and
+Marshall Field. Leopold's knowledge is gained through many spies, by
+voluminous reports, by following up the expenditure of each centime,
+of each arm's-length of blue <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span>cloth. Of every Belgian employed on
+his farm, and ninety-five per cent. are Belgians, he holds the
+<i>dossier</i>; he knows how many kilos a month the agent whips out of
+his villages, how many bottles of absinthe he smuggles from the
+French side, whether he lives with one black woman or five, why his
+white wife in Belgium left him, why he left Belgium, why he dare not
+return. The agent knows that Leopold, King of the Belgians, knows,
+and that he has shared that knowledge with the agent's employer, the
+man who by bribes of rich bonuses incites him to crime, the man who
+could throw him into a Belgian jail, Leopold, King of the Congo.</p>
+
+<p>The agent decides for him it is best to please both Leopolds, and
+Leopold makes no secret of what best pleases him. For not only is he
+responsible for the atrocities, in that he does not try to suppress
+them, but he is doubly guilty in that he has encouraged them. This
+he has done with cynical, callous publicity, without effort at
+concealment, without shame. Men who, in obtaining rubber, committed
+unspeakable crimes, the memory of which makes other men
+uncomfortable in their presence, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span>Leopold rewarded with rich
+bonuses, pensions, higher office, gilt badges of shame, and rapid
+advancement. To those whom even his own judges sentenced to many
+years' imprisonment he promptly granted the royal pardon, promoted,
+and sent back to work in the vineyard.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That is the sort of man for <i>me</i>,&quot; his action seemed to say. &quot;See
+how I value that good and faithful servant. That man collected much
+rubber. You observe I do not ask how he got it. I will not ask you.
+All you need do is to collect rubber. Use our improved methods. Gum
+copal rubbed in the kinky hair of the chief and then set on fire
+burns, so my agents tell me, like vitriol. For collecting rubber the
+chief is no longer valuable, but to his successor it is an
+object-lesson. Let me recommend also the <i>chicotte</i>, the torture
+tower, the 'hostage' house, and the crucifix. Many other stimulants
+to labor will no doubt suggest themselves to you and to your
+cannibal 'sentries.' Help to make me rich, and don't fear the
+'State.' '<i>L'Etat, c'est moi!</i>' Go as far as you like!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I said the degradations and tortures <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span>practised by the men &quot;working
+on commission&quot; for Leopold are unprintable, but they have been
+printed, and those who wish to read a calmly compiled, careful, and
+correct record of their deeds will find it in the &quot;Red Rubber&quot; of
+Mr. E.R. Morel. An even better book by the same authority, on the
+whole history of the State, is his &quot;King Leopold's Rule in the
+Congo.&quot; Mr. Morel has many enemies. So, early in the nineteenth
+century, had the English Abolitionists, Wilberforce and Granville
+Sharp. After they were dead they were buried in the Abbey, and their
+portraits were placed in the National Gallery. People who wish to
+assist in freeing twenty millions of human beings should to-day
+support Mr. Morel. It will be of more service to the blacks than,
+after he is dead, burying him in Westminster Abbey.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Morel, the American and English missionaries, and the English
+Consul, Roger Casement, and other men, in Belgium, have made a
+magnificent fight against Leopold; but the Powers to whom they have
+appealed have been silent. Taking courage of this silence, Leopold
+has divided the Congo into <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span>several great territories in which the
+sole right to work rubber is conceded to certain persons. To those
+who protested that no one in the Congo &quot;Free&quot; State but the King
+could trade in rubber, Leopold, as an answer, pointed with pride at
+the preserves of these foreigners. And he may well point at them
+with pride, for in some of those companies he owns a third, and in
+most of them he holds a half, or a controlling interest. The
+directors of the foreign companies are his cronies, members of his
+royal household, his brokers, bankers. You have only to read the
+names published in the lists of the Brussels Stock Exchange to see
+that these &quot;trading companies,&quot; under different aliases, are
+Leopold. Having, then, &quot;conceded&quot; the greater part of the Congo to
+himself, Leopold set aside the best part of it, so far as rubber is
+concerned, as a <i>Domaine Priv&eacute;</i>. Officially the receipts of this pay
+for running the government, and for schools, roads and wharfs, for
+which taxes were levied, but for which, after twenty years, one
+looks in vain. Leopold claims that through the Congo he is out of
+pocket; that this carrying the banner of civilization in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span>Africa
+does not pay. Through his press bureaus he tells that his sympathy
+for his black brother, his desire to see the commerce of the world
+busy along the Congo, alone prevents him giving up what is for him a
+losing business. There are several answers to this. One is that in
+the Kasai Company alone Leopold owns 2,010 shares of stock. Worth
+originally $50 a share, the value of each share rose to $3,100,
+making at one time his total shares worth $5,421,000. In the
+A.B.I.R. Concession he owns 1,000 shares, originally worth $100
+each, later worth $940. In the &quot;vintage year&quot; of 1900 each of these
+shares was worth $5,050, and the 1,000 shares thus rose to the value
+of $5,050,000.</p>
+
+<p>These are only two companies. In most of the others half the shares
+are owned by the King.</p>
+
+<p>As published in the &quot;State Bulletin,&quot; the money received in eight
+years for rubber and ivory gathered in the <i>Domaine Priv&eacute;</i> differs
+from the amount given for it in the market at Antwerp. The official
+estimates show a loss to the government. The actual sales show that
+the government, over and above its own <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span>estimate of its expenses,
+instead of losing, made from the <i>Domaine Priv&eacute;</i> alone $10,000,000.
+We are left wondering to whom went that unaccounted-for $10,000,000.
+Certainly the King would not take it, for, to reimburse himself for
+his efforts, he early in the game reserved for himself another tract
+of territory known as the <i>Domaine de la Couronne</i>. For years he
+denied that this existed. He knew nothing of Crown Lands. But, at
+last, in the Belgian Chamber, it was publicly charged that for years
+from this private source, which he had said did not exist, Leopold
+had been drawing an income of $15,000,000. Since then the truth of
+this statement has been denied, but at the time in the Chamber it
+was not contradicted.</p>
+
+<p>To-day, grown insolent by the apathy of the Powers, Leopold finds
+disguising himself as a company, as a laborer worthy of his hire,
+irksome. He now decrees that as &quot;Sovereign&quot; over the Congo all of
+the Congo belongs to him. It is as much his property as is a
+pheasant drive, as is a staked-out mining claim, as your hat is your
+property. And the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are there
+only <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span>on his sufferance. They are his &quot;tenants.&quot; He permits each
+the hut in which he lives, and the garden adjoining that hut, but
+his work must be for Leopold, and everything else, animal, mineral,
+or vegetable, belongs to Leopold. The natives not only may not sell
+ivory or rubber to independent traders, but if it is found in their
+possession it is seized; and if you and I bought a tusk of ivory
+here it would be taken from us and we could be prosecuted. This is
+the law. Other men rule over territories more vast even than the
+Congo. The King of England rules an empire upon which the sun never
+sets. But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even
+the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could
+not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going
+into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa
+and saying: &quot;This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must
+not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American. If they
+buy from you they are 'receivers of stolen goods.' To feed my
+soldiers you must drag my river for my fish. For me, in my swamp and
+in my jungle, you <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span>must toil twenty-four days of each month to
+gather my rubber. You must not hunt the elephants, for they are my
+elephants. Those tusks that fifty years ago your grandfather, with
+his naked spear, cut from an elephant, and which you have tried to
+hide from me under the floor of this hut, are my ivory. Because that
+elephant, running wild through the jungle fifty years ago, belonged
+to me. And you yourself are mine, your time is mine, your labor is
+mine, your wife, your children, all are mine. They belong to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img6" id="img6"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-06.jpg" width="500" height="319" alt="&quot;Tenants&quot; of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+Tenants." title="&quot;Tenants&quot; of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+Tenants." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">&quot;Tenants&quot; of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+Belongs to Him, <br />
+and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+Tenants. </p>
+
+<p>This, then, is the &quot;open door&quot; as I find it to-day in the Congo. It
+is an incredible state of affairs, so insolent, so magnificent in
+its impertinence, that it would be humorous, were it not for its
+background of misery and suffering, for its hostage houses, its
+chain gangs, its <i>chicottes</i>, its nameless crimes against the human
+body, its baskets of dried hands held up in tribute to the Belgian
+blackguard.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span>
+
+<h3>THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Leopold's &quot;shop&quot; has its front door at Banana. Its house flag is a
+golden star on a blue background. Banana is the port of entry to the
+Congo. You have, no doubt, seen many ports of Europe&mdash;Antwerp,
+Hamburg, Boulogne, Lisbon, Genoa, Marseilles. Banana is the port of
+entry to a country as large as Western Europe, and while the imports
+and exports of Europe trickle through all these cities, the commerce
+of the Congo enters and departs entirely at Banana. You can then
+picture the busy harbor, the jungle of masts, the white bridges and
+awnings of the steamers. By the fat funnels and the flags you can
+distinguish the English tramps, the German merchantmen, the French,
+Dutch, Italian, Portuguese traders, the smart &quot;liners&quot; from
+Liverpool, even the Arab dhows with bird-wing sails, even the steel,
+four-masted <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span>schooners out of Boston, U.S.A. You can imagine the
+toiling lighters, the slap-dash tenders, the launches with shrieking
+whistles.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, you suspect it is not a bit like that. But were it for
+fourteen countries the &quot;open door&quot; to twenty millions of people,
+that is how it might look.</p>
+
+<p>Instead, it is the private entrance to the preserves of a private
+individual. So what you really see is, on the one hand, islands of
+mangrove bushes, with their roots in the muddy water; on the other,
+Banana, a strip of sand and palm trees without a wharf, quay,
+landing stage, without a pier to which you could make fast anything
+larger than a rowboat.</p>
+
+<p>In a canoe naked natives paddle alongside to sell fish; a peevish
+little man in a sun hat, who, in order to save Leopold three
+salaries, holds four port offices, is being rowed to the gangway; on
+shore the only other visible inhabitant of Banana, a man with no
+nerves, is disturbing the brooding, sweating silence by knocking the
+rust off the plates of a stranded mud-scow. Welcome to our city!
+Welcome to busy, bustling Banana, the port of entry of the Congo
+Free State.</p>
+
+<a name="img7" id="img7"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-07.jpg" width="500" height="352" alt="The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+Entry to the Congo, Are Limited." title="The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+Entry to the Congo, Are Limited." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+Entry to the Congo, Are Limited. </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span>In a canoe we were paddled to the back yard of the caf&eacute; of Madame
+Samuel, and from that bower of warm beer and sardine tins trudged
+through the sun up one side of Banana and down the other. In between
+the two paths were the bungalows and gardens of forty white men and
+two white women. Many of the gardens, as was most of Banana, were
+neglected, untidy, littered with condensed-milk tins. Others, more
+carefully tended, were laid out in rigid lines. With all tropical
+nature to draw upon, nothing had been imagined. The most ambitious
+efforts were designs in whitewashed shells and protruding beer
+bottles. We could not help remembering the gardens in Japan, of the
+poorest and the most ignorant coolies. Do I seem to find fault with
+Banana out of all proportion to its importance? It is because
+Banana, the Congo's most advanced post of civilization, is typical
+of all that lies beyond.</p>
+
+<p>From what I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy,
+malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy,
+monotonous, depressing.</p>
+
+<p>But on the way to Boma and, later, when <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span>I travelled on the Upper
+Congo, I thought the river more beautiful than any great river I had
+ever seen. It was full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes it ran
+between palm-covered banks of yellow sand as low as those of the
+Mississippi or the Nile; and again, in half an hour, the banks were
+rock and as heavily wooded as the mountains of Montana, or as white
+and bold as the cliffs of Dover, or we passed between great hills,
+covered with what looked like giant oaks, and with their peaks
+hidden in the clouds. I found it like no other river, because in
+some one particular it was like them all. Between Banana and Boma
+the banks first screened us in with the tangled jungle of the
+tropics, and then opened up great wind-swept plateaux, leading to
+hills that suggested&mdash;of all places&mdash;England, and, at that,
+cultivated England. The contour of the hills, the shape of the
+trees, the shade of their green contrasted with the green of the
+grass, were like only the cliffs above Plymouth. One did not look
+for native kraals and the wild antelope, but for the square,
+ivy-topped tower of the village church, the loaf-shaped hayricks,
+slow-moving masses of sheep. But <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span>this that looks like a pasture
+land is only coarse limestone covered with bitter, unnutritious
+grass, which benefits neither beast nor man.</p>
+
+<p>At sunset we anchored in the current three miles from Boma, and at
+daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the
+government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor,
+who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper
+and as a king by divine right. He is a figurehead. The real
+administrator is M. Vandamme, the Secr&eacute;taire-G&eacute;n&eacute;ral, the
+ubiquitous, the mysterious, whose name before you leave Southampton
+is in the air, of whom all men, whether they speak in French or
+English, speak well. It is from Boma that M. Vandamme sends
+collectors of rubber, politely labeled inspecteurs, directeurs,
+judges, capitaines, and sous-lieutenants to their posts, and
+distributes them over one million square miles.</p>
+
+<p>Boma is the capital of a country which is as large as six nations of
+the European continent. For twenty-five years it has been the
+capital. Therefore, the reader already guesses that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span>Boma has only
+one wharf, and at that wharf there is no custom-house, no warehouse,
+not even a canvas awning under which, during the six months of rainy
+season, one might seek shelter for himself and his baggage.</p>
+
+<p>Our debarkation reminded me of a landing of filibusters. A wharf
+forty yards long led from the steamer to the bank. Down this marched
+the officers of the army, the clerks, the bookkeepers, and on the
+bank and in the street each dumped his boxes, his sword, his
+camp-bed, his full-dress helmet. It looked as though a huge eviction
+had taken place, as though a retreating army, having gained the
+river's edge, were waiting for a transport. It was not as though to
+the government the coming of these gentlemen was a complete
+surprise; regularly every three weeks at that exact spot a like
+number disembark. But in years the State has not found it worth
+while to erect for them even an open zinc shed. The cargo invoiced
+to the State is given equal consideration.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Prisoners of the State,&quot; each wearing round his neck a steel ring
+from which a chain stretches to the ring of another &quot;prisoner,&quot;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span>carried the cargo to the open street, where lay the luggage of the
+officers, and there dropped it. Mingled with steamer chairs, tin
+bathtubs, gun-cases, were great crates of sheet iron, green boxes of
+gin, bags of Teneriffe potatoes, boilers of an engine. Upon the
+scene the sun beat with vicious, cruel persistence. Those officers
+who had already served in the Congo dropped their belongings under
+the shadow of a solitary tree. Those who for the first time were
+seeing the capital of the country they had sworn to serve sank upon
+their boxes and, with dismay in their eyes, mopped their red and
+dripping brows.</p>
+
+<a name="img8" id="img8"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-08.jpg" width="500" height="308" alt="&quot;Prisoners&quot; of the State in Chains at Matadi." title="&quot;Prisoners&quot; of the State in Chains at Matadi."/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">&quot;Prisoners&quot; of the State in Chains at Matadi. </p>
+
+<p>Boma is built at the foot of a hill of red soil. It is a town of
+scattered buildings made of wood and sheet-iron plates, sent out in
+crates, and held together with screws. To Boma nature has been
+considerate. She has contributed many trees, two or three long
+avenues of palms, and in the many gardens caused flowers to blossom
+and flourish. In the report of the &quot;Commission of Enquiry&quot; which
+Leopold was forced to send out in 1904 to investigate the
+atrocities, and each member of which, for his four months' work,
+received <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span>$20,000, Boma is described as possessing &quot;the daintiness
+and <i>chic</i> of a European watering-place.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Boma really is like a seaport of one of the Central American republics.
+It has a temporary sufficient-to-the-day-for-to-morrow-we-die air.
+It looks like a military post that at any moment might be abandoned.
+To remove this impression the State has certain exhibits which seem
+to point to a stable and good government. There is a well-conducted
+hospital and clean, well-built barracks; for the amusement of the
+black soldiers even a theatre, and for the higher officials
+attractive bungalows, a bandstand, where twice a week a negro band
+plays by ear, and plays exceedingly well. There is even a
+lawn-tennis court, where the infrequent visitor to the Congo is
+welcomed, and, by the courteous Mr. Vandamme, who plays tennis as
+well as he does every thing else, entertained. Boma is the shop
+window of Leopold's big store. The good features of Boma are like
+those attractive articles one sometimes sees in a shop window, but
+which in the shop one fails to find&mdash;at least, I did not find them
+in the shop. Outside of Boma <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span>I looked in vain for a school
+conducted by the State, like the one at Boma, such as those the
+United States Government gave by the hundred to the Philippines. I
+found not one. And I looked for such a hospital as the one I saw at
+Boma, such as our government has placed for its employes along, and
+at both ends of, the Isthmus of Panama, and, except for the one at
+Leopoldville, I saw none.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the fact that Boma is a &quot;European watering-place,&quot; all
+the servants of the State with whom I talked wanted to get away from
+it, especially those who already had served in the interior. To
+appreciate what Boma lacks one has only to visit the neighboring
+seaports on the same coast; the English towns of Sierra Leone and
+Calabar, the French town of Libreville in the French Congo, the
+German seaport Duala in the Cameroons, but especially Calabar in
+Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years
+younger than Boma, and in its municipal government, its
+street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons,
+hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital;
+it is the distributing factory for a huge trading <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span>concern, and a
+particularly selfish one. There is, as I have said, only one wharf,
+and at that wharf, without paying the State, only State boats may
+discharge cargo, so the English, Dutch, and German boats are forced
+to &quot;tie up&quot; along the river front. There the grass is eight feet
+high and breeds mosquitoes and malaria, and conceals the wary
+crocodile. At night, from the deck of the steamer, all one can see
+of this capital is a fringe of this high grass in the light from the
+air ports, and on shore three gas-lamps. No caf&eacute;s are open, no
+sailors carouse, no lighted window suggests that some one is giving
+a dinner, that some one is playing bridge. Darkness, gloom, silence
+mark this &quot;European watering-place.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You ask me,&quot; demanded a Belgian lieutenant one night as we stood
+together by the rail, &quot;whether I like better the bush, where there
+is no white man in a hundred miles, or to be stationed at Boma?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He threw out his hands at the gas-lamps, rapidly he pointed at each
+of them in turn.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Voil&agrave;, Boma!&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p>From Boma we steamed six hours farther up the river to Matadi. On
+the way we stopped <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span>at Noqui, the home of Portuguese traders on the
+Portuguese bank, which, as one goes up-stream, lies to starboard.
+Here the current runs at from four to five miles an hour, and has so
+sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with
+the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used
+more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to
+see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank
+looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her
+propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, cutting
+the eel-grass.</p>
+
+<p>At Matadi the Congo makes one of her lightning changes. Her banks,
+which have been low and woody, with, on the Portuguese side,
+glimpses of boundless plateaux, become towering hills of rock. At
+Matadi the cataracts and rapids begin, and for two hundred miles
+continue to Stanley Pool, which is the beginning of the Upper Congo.
+Leopoldville is situated on Stanley Pool, just to the right of where
+the rapids start their race to the south. With Leopoldville above
+and Boma below, still nearer the mouth of the river, Matadi makes a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span>centre link in the chain of the three important towns of the Lower
+Congo.</p>
+
+<p>When Henry M. Stanley was halted by the cataracts and forced to
+leave the river he disembarked his expedition on the bank opposite
+Matadi, and a mile farther up-stream. It was from this point he
+dragged and hauled his boats, until he again reached smooth water at
+Stanley Pool. The wagons on which he carried the boats still can be
+seen lying on the bank, broken and rusty. Like the sight of old gun
+carriages and dismantled cannon, they give one a distinct thrill.
+Now, on the bank opposite from where they lie, the railroad runs
+from Matadi to Leopoldville.</p>
+
+<p>The Congo forces upon one a great admiration for Stanley. Unless
+civilization utterly alters it, it must always be a monument to his
+courage, and as you travel farther and see the difficulties placed
+in his way, your admiration increases. There are men here who make
+little of what Stanley accomplished; but they are men who seldom
+leave their own compound, and, who, when they do go up the river,
+travel at ease, not in a canoe, or on foot <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span>through the jungle, but
+in the smoking-room of the steamer and in a first-class railroad
+carriage. That they are able so to travel is due to the man they
+would belittle. The nickname given to Stanley by the natives is
+to-day the nickname of the government. Matadi means rock. When
+Stanley reached the town of Matadi, which is surrounded entirely by
+rock, he began with dynamite to blast roads for his caravan. The
+natives called him Bula Matadi, the Breaker of Rocks, and, as in
+those days he was the Government, the Law, and the Prophets, Bula
+Matadi, who then was the white man who governed, now signifies the
+white man's government. But it is a very different government, and a
+very different white man. With the natives the word is universal.
+They say &quot;Bula Matadi wood post.&quot; &quot;Not traders' chop, Bula Matadi's
+chop.&quot; &quot;Him no missionary steamer, him Bula Matadi steamer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The town of Matadi is of importance as the place where, owing to the
+rapids, passengers and cargoes are reshipped on the railroad to the
+<i>haut Congo</i>. It is a railroad terminus only, and it looks it. The
+railroad station and store-houses <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span>are close to the river bank, and,
+spread over several acres of cinders, are the railroad yard and
+machine shops. Above those buildings of hot corrugated zinc and the
+black soil rises a great rock. It is not so large as Gibraltar, or
+so high as the Flatiron Building, but it is a little more steep than
+either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat
+stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove
+lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their
+surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your
+stomach, and the soles of your mosquito boots. The three streets
+lead to a parade ground no larger than and as bare as a brickyard.
+It is surrounded by the buildings of Bula Matadi, the post-office,
+the custom-house, the barracks, and the Caf&eacute; Franco-Belge. It has a
+tableland fifty yards wide of yellow clay so beaten by thousands of
+naked feet, so baked by the heat, that it is as hard as a brass
+shield. Other tablelands may be higher, but this is the one nearest
+the sun. You cross it wearily, in short rushes, with your heart in
+your throat, and seeking shade, as a man crossing the zone of fire
+seeks cover from the bullets. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span>When you reach the cool, dirty
+custom-house, with walls two feet thick, you congratulate yourself
+on your escape; you look back into the blaze of the flaming plaza
+and wonder if you have the courage to return.</p>
+
+<a name="img9" id="img9"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 336px;">
+<img src="images/img-09.jpg" width="336" height="450" alt="Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade."
+title="Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade. </p>
+
+<p>At the custom-house I paid duty on articles I could not possibly
+have bought anywhere in the Congo, as, for instance, a tent and a
+folding-bed, and for a license to carry arms. A young man with a
+hammer and tiny branding irons beat little stars and the number of
+my license to <i>porter d'armes</i> on the stock of each weapon. Without
+permission of Bula Matadi on leaving the Congo, one can not sell his
+guns, or give them away. This is a precaution to prevent weapons
+falling into the hands of the native. For some reason a native with
+a gun alarms Bula Matadi. Just on the other bank of the river the
+French, who do not seem to fear the black brother, sell him
+flint-lock rifles, as many as his heart desires.</p>
+
+<p>On the steamer there was a mild young missionary coming out, for the
+first time, to whom some unobserving friend had given a fox-terrier.
+The young man did not care for the dog. He had never owned a dog,
+and did not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span>know what to do with this one. Her name was &quot;Fanny,&quot;
+and only by the efforts of all on board did she reach the Congo
+alive. There was no one, from the butcher to the captain, including
+the passengers, who had not shielded Fanny from the cold, and later
+from the sun, fed her, bathed her, forced medicine down her throat,
+and raced her up and down the spar deck. Consequently we all knew
+Fanny, and it was a great shock when from the custom-house I saw her
+running around the blazing parade ground, her eyes filled with fear
+and &quot;lost dog&quot; written all over her, from her drooping tongue to her
+drooping tail. Captain Burton and I called &quot;Fanny,&quot; and, not seeking
+suicide for ourselves, sent half a dozen black boys to catch her.
+But Fanny never liked her black uncles; on the steamer the Kroo boys
+learned to give her the length of her chain, and so we were forced
+to plunge to her rescue into the valley of heat. Perhaps she thought
+we were again going to lock her up on the steamer, or perhaps that
+it was a friendly game, for she ran from us as fast as from the
+black boys. In Matadi no one ever had crossed the parade ground
+except at a funeral march, and the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span>spectacle of two large white
+men playing tag with a small fox-terrier attracted an immense
+audience. The officials and clerks left work and peered between the
+iron-barred windows, the &quot;prisoners&quot; in chains ceased breaking rock
+and stared dumbly from the barracks, the black &quot;sentries&quot; shrieked
+and gesticulated, the naked bush boys, in from a long caravan
+journey, rose from the side of their burdens and commented upon our
+man&oelig;uvres in gloomy, guttural tones. I suspect they thought we
+wanted Fanny for &quot;chop.&quot; Finally Fanny ran into the legs of a German
+trader, who grabbed her by the neck and held her up to us.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You want him? Hey?&quot; he shouted.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ay, man,&quot; gasped Burton, now quite purple, &quot;did you think we were
+trying to amuse the dog?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I made a leash of my belt, and the captain returned to the ship
+dragging his prisoner after him. An hour later I met the youthful
+missionary leading Fanny by a rope.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I must tell you about Fanny,&quot; he cried. &quot;After I took her to the
+Mission I forgot to tie her up&mdash;as I suppose I should have done&mdash;and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span>she ran away. But, would you believe it, she found her way straight
+back to the ship. Was it not intelligent of her?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was too far gone with apoplexy, heat prostration, and sunstroke to
+make any answer, at least one that I could make to a missionary.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Fanny, the young missionary, and I left for
+Leopoldville on the railroad. It is a narrow-gauge railroad built
+near Matadi through the solid rock and later twisting and turning so
+often that at many places one can see the track on three different
+levels. It is not a State road, but was built and is owned by a
+Dutch company, and, except that it charges exorbitant rates and does
+not keep its carriages clean, it is well run, and the road-bed is
+excellent. But it runs a passenger train only three times a week,
+and though the distance is so short, and though the train starts at
+6:30 in the morning, it does not get you to Leopoldville the same
+day. Instead, you must rest over night at Thysville and start at
+seven the next morning. That afternoon at three you reach
+Leopoldville. For the two hundred and fifty miles the fare is two
+hundred francs, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span>and one is limited to sixty pounds of luggage. That
+was the weight allowed by the Japanese to each war correspondent,
+and as they gave us six months in Tokio in which to do nothing else
+but weigh our equipment, I left Matadi without a penalty. Had my
+luggage exceeded the limit, for each extra pound I would have had to
+pay the company ten cents. To the Belgian officers and agents who go
+for three years to serve the State in the bush the regulation is
+especially harsh, and in a company so rich, particularly mean. To
+many a poor officer, and on the pay they receive there are no rich
+ones, the tax is prohibitive. It forces them to leave behind
+medicines, clothing, photographic supplies, all ammunition, which
+means no chance of helping out with duck and pigeon the daily menu
+of goat and tinned sausages, and, what is the greatest hardship, all
+books. This regulation, which the State permitted to the
+concessionaires of the railroad, sends the agents of the State into
+the wilderness physically and mentally unequipped, and it is no
+wonder the weaker brothers go mad, and act accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>My black boys travelled second-class, which <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span>means an open car with
+narrow seats very close together and a wooden roof. On these cars
+passengers are allowed twenty pounds of luggage and permitted to
+collect two hundred and fifty miles of heat and dust. To a black boy
+twenty pounds is little enough, for he travels with much more
+baggage than an average &quot;blanc.&quot; I am not speaking of the Congo boy.
+All the possessions the State leaves him he could carry in his
+pockets, and he has no pockets. But wherever he goes the Kroo boy,
+Mendi boy, or Sierra Leone boy carries all his belongings with him
+in a tin trunk painted pink, green, or yellow. He is never separated
+from his &quot;box,&quot; and the recognized uniform of a Kroo boy at work, is
+his breechcloth, and hanging from a ribbon around his knee, the key
+to his box. If a boy has no box he generally carries three keys.</p>
+
+<p>In the first-class car were three French officers en route to
+Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo, and a dog, a sad
+mongrel, very dirty, very hungry. On each side of the tiny toy car
+were six revolving-chairs, so the four men, not to speak of the dog,
+quite filled it. And to our own bulk each added hand-bags, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span>cases of
+beer, helmets, gun-cases, cameras, water-bottles, and, as the road
+does not supply food of any kind, his chop-box. A chop-box is
+anything that holds food, and for food of every kind, for the hours
+of feeding, and the verb &quot;to feed,&quot; on the West Coast, the only
+word, the &quot;lazy&quot; word, is &quot;chop.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The absent-minded young missionary, with Fanny jammed between his
+ankles, and looking out miserably upon the world, and two other
+young missionaries, travelled second-class.</p>
+
+<p>They were even more crowded together than were we, but not so much
+with luggage as with humanity. But as a protest against the high
+charges of the railroad the missionaries always travel in the open
+car. These three young men were for the first time out of England,
+and in any fashion were glad to start on their long journey up the
+Congo to Bolobo. To them whatever happened was a joke. It was a joke
+even when the colored &quot;wife&quot; of one of the French officers used the
+broad shoulders of one of them as a pillow and slept sweetly. She
+was a large, good-natured, good-looking mulatto, and at the frequent
+stations the French officer ran back to her with &quot;white man's chop,&quot;
+a tin <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span>of sausages, a pineapple, a bottle of beer. She drank the
+beer from the bottle, and with religious tolerance offered it to the
+Baptists. They assured her without the least regret that they were
+teetotalers. To the other blacks in the open car the sight of a
+white man waiting on one of their own people was a thrilling
+spectacle. They regarded the woman who could command such services
+with respect. It would be interesting to know what they thought of
+the white man. At each station the open car disgorged its occupants
+to fill with water the beer bottle each carried, and to buy from the
+natives kwango, the black man's bread, a flaky, sticky flour that
+tastes like boiled chestnuts; and pineapples at a franc for ten. And
+such pineapples! Not hard and rubber-like, as we know them at home,
+but delicious, juicy, melting in the mouth like hothouse grapes,
+and, also, after each mouthful, making a complete bath necessary.
+One of the French officers had a lump of ice which he broke into
+pieces and divided with the others. They saluted magnificently many
+times, and as each drowned the morsel in his tin cup of beer, one of
+them cried with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span>perfect simplicity: &quot;C'est Paris!&quot; This reminded me
+that the ship's steward had placed much ice in my chop basket, and I
+carried some of it to another car in which were five of the White
+Sisters. For nineteen days I had been with them on the steamer, but
+they had spoken to no one, and I was doubtful how they would accept
+my offering. But the Mother Superior gave permission, and they took
+the ice through the car window, their white hoods bristling with the
+excitement of the adventure. They were on their way to a post still
+two months' journey up the river, nearly to Lake Tanganyika, and for
+three years or, possibly, until they died, that was the last ice
+they would see.</p>
+
+<p>At Bongolo station the division superintendent came in the car and
+everybody offered him refreshment, and in return he told us, in the
+hope of interesting us, of a washout, and then casually mentioned
+that an hour before an elephant had blocked the track. It seemed so
+much too good to be true that I may have expressed some doubt, for
+he said: &quot;Why, of course and certainly. Already this morning one was
+at Sariski Station and another at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span>Sipeto.&quot; And instead of looking
+out of the window I had been reading an American magazine, filched
+from the smoking-room, which was one year old!</p>
+
+<p>At Thysville the railroad may have opened a hotel, but when I was
+there to hunt for a night's shelter it turned you out bag and
+baggage. The French officers decided to risk a Portuguese trading
+store known as the &quot;Ideal Hotel,&quot; and the missionaries very kindly
+gave me the freedom of their Rest House. It is kept open for
+those of the Mission who pass between the Upper and Lower Congo.
+At the station the young missionaries were met by two older
+missionaries&mdash;Mr. Weekes, who furnished the &quot;Commission of Enquiry&quot;
+with much evidence, which they would not, or were not allowed to,
+print, and Mr. Jennings. With them were twenty &quot;boys&quot; from the
+Mission and, with each of them carrying a piece of our baggage on
+his head, we climbed the hill, and I was given a clean, comfortable,
+completely appointed bedroom. Our combined chop we turned over to a
+black brother. He is the custodian of the Rest House and an
+excellent cook. While he was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span>preparing it my boys spread out my
+folding rubber tub. Had I closed the door I should have smothered,
+so, in the presence of twenty interested black Baptists, I took an
+embarrassing but one of the most necessary baths I can remember.</p>
+
+<p>There still was a piece of the ice remaining, and as the interest in
+the bathtub had begun to drag I handed it to one of my audience. He
+yelled as though I had thrust into his hand a drop of vitriol, and,
+leaping in the air, threw the ice on the floor and dared any one to
+touch it. From the &quot;personal&quot; boys who had travelled to Matadi the
+Mission boys had heard of ice. But none had ever seen it. They
+approached it as we would a rattlesnake. Each touched it and then
+sprang away. Finally one, his eyes starting from his head,
+cautiously stroked the inoffensive brick and then licked his
+fingers. The effect was instantaneous. He assured the others it was
+&quot;good chop,&quot; and each of them sat hunched about it on his heels,
+stroking it, and licking his fingers, and then with delighted
+thrills rubbing them over his naked body. The little block of ice
+that at Liverpool was only a &quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span>quart of water&quot; had assumed the value
+of a diamond.</p>
+
+<p>Dinner was enlivened by an incident. Mr. Weekes, with orders simply
+to &quot;fry these,&quot; had given to the assistant of the cook two tins of
+sausages. The small <i>chef</i> presented them to us in the pan in which
+he had cooked them, but he had obeyed instructions to the letter and
+had fried the tins unopened.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner we sat until late, while the older men told the young
+missionaries of atrocities of which, in the twenty years and within
+the last three years, they had been witnesses. Already in Mr.
+Morel's books I had read their testimony, but hearing from the men
+themselves the tales of outrage and cruelty gave them a fresh and
+more intimate value, and sent me to bed hot and sick with
+indignation. But, nevertheless, the night I slept at Thysville was
+the only cool one I knew in the Congo. It was as cool as is a night
+in autumn at home. Thysville, between the Upper and the Lower Congo,
+with its fresh mountain air, is an obvious site for a hospital for
+the servants of the State. To the Congo it should be what <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span>Simla is
+to the sick men of India; but the State is not running hospitals. It
+is in the rubber business.</p>
+
+<p>All steamers for the Upper Congo and her great tributaries, whether
+they belong to the State or the Missions, start from Leopoldville.
+There they fit out for voyages, some of which last three and four
+months. So it is a place of importance, but, like Boma, it looks as
+though the people who yesterday built it meant to-morrow to move
+out. The river-front is one long dump-heap. It is a grave-yard for
+rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars. The interior of the
+principal storehouse for ships' supplies, directly in front of the
+office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old
+iron and newspapers. I should have enjoyed taking the captain of the
+port by the neck and showing him the water-front and marine shops at
+Calabar; the wharfs and quays of stone, the open places spread with
+gravel, the whitewashed cement gutters, the spare parts of
+machinery, greased and labeled in their proper shelves, even the
+condemned scrap-iron in orderly piles; the whole yard as trim as a
+battleship.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span>On the river-front at Leopoldville a grossly fat man, collarless,
+coatless, purple-faced, perspiring, was rushing up and down. He was
+the captain of the port. Black women had assembled to greet
+returning black soldiers, and the captain was calling upon the black
+sentries to drive them away. The sentries, yelling, fell upon the
+women with their six-foot staves and beat them over the head and
+bare shoulders, and as they fled, screaming, the captain of the port
+danced in the sun shaking his fists after them and raging violently.
+Next morning I was told he had tried to calm his nerves with
+absinthe, which is not particularly good for nerves, and was
+exceedingly unwell. I was sorry for him. The picture of discipline
+afforded by the glazed-eyed official, reeling and cursing in the
+open street, had been illuminating.</p>
+
+<p>Although at Leopoldville the State has failed to build wharfs, the
+esthetic features of the town have not been neglected, and there is
+a pretty plaza called Stanley Park. In the centre of this plaza is a
+pillar with, at its base, a bust of Leopold, and on the top of the
+pillar a plaster-of-Paris lady, nude, and, not unlike <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span>the
+Bacchante of MacMonnies. Not so much from the likeness as from
+history, I deduced that the lady must be Cl&eacute;o de M&eacute;rode. But whether
+the monument is erected to her or to Leopold, or to both of them, I
+do not know.</p>
+
+<a name="img10" id="img10"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 258px;">
+<img src="images/img-10.jpg" width="258" height="450" alt="The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+Stanley, but to Leopold." title= "The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+Stanley, but to Leopold." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+Stanley, but to Leopold. </p>
+
+<p>I left Leopoldville in the <i>Deliverance</i>. Some of the State boats
+that make the long trip to Stanleyville are very large ships. They
+have plenty of deck room and many cabins. With their flat, raft-like
+hull, their paddle-wheel astern, and the covered sun deck, they
+resemble gigantic house-boats. Of one of these boats the
+<i>Deliverance</i> was only one-third the size, but I took passage on her
+because she would give me a chance to see not only something of the
+Congo, but also one of its great tributaries, the less travelled
+Kasai. The <i>Deliverance</i> was about sixty-five feet over all and drew
+three feet of water. She was built like a mud-scow, with a deck of
+iron plates. Amidships, on this deck, was a tiny cabin with berths
+for two passengers and standing room for one. The furnaces and
+boiler were forward, banked by piles of wood. All the river boats
+burn only wood. Her engines were in the stern. These engines and the
+driving-rod <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span>to the paddle-wheel were uncovered. This gives the
+<i>Deliverance</i> the look of a large automobile without a tonneau. You
+were constantly wondering what had gone wrong with the carbureter,
+and if it rained what would happen to her engines. Supported on iron
+posts was an upper deck, on which, forward, stood the captain's box
+of a cabin and directly in front of it the steering-wheel. The
+telegraph, which signalled to the openwork engine below, and a
+dining table as small as a chess-board, completely filled the
+&quot;bridge.&quot; When we sat at table the captain's boy could only just
+squeeze himself between us and the rail. It was like dining in a
+private box. And certainly no theatre ever offered such scenery, nor
+did any menagerie ever present so many strange animals.</p>
+
+<p>We were four white men: Captain Jensen, his engineer, and the other
+passenger, Captain Anfossi, a young Italian. Before he reached his
+post he had to travel one month on the <i>Deliverance</i> and for another
+month walk through the jungle. He was the most cheerful and amusing
+companion, and had he been returning after three years of exile to
+his home <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span>he could not have been more brimful of spirits. Captain
+Jensen was a Dane (almost every river captain is a Swede or a Dane)
+and talked a little English, a little French, and a little Bangala.
+The mechanician was a Finn and talked the native Bangala, and
+Anfossi spoke French. After chop, when we were all assembled on the
+upper deck, there would be the most extraordinary talks in four
+languages, or we would appoint one man to act as a clearing-house,
+and he would translate for the others.</p>
+
+<p>On the lower deck we carried twenty &quot;wood boys,&quot; whose duty was to
+cut wood for the furnace, and about thirty black passengers. They
+were chiefly soldiers, who had finished their period of service for
+the State, with their wives and children. They were crowded on the
+top of the hatches into a space fifteen by fifteen feet between our
+cabin door and the furnace. Around the combings of the hatches, and
+where the scuppers would have been had the <i>Deliverance</i> had
+scuppers, the river raced over the deck to a depth of four or five
+inches. When the passengers wanted to wash their few clothes or
+themselves they carried on their ablutions and laundry work where
+they happened <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span>to be sitting. But for Anfossi and myself to go from
+our cabin to the iron ladder of the bridge it was necessary to wade
+both in the water and to make stepping stones of the passengers. I
+do not mean that we merely stepped over an occasional arm or leg. I
+mean we walked on them. You have seen a football player, in a hurry
+to make a touchdown, hurdle without prejudice both friends and foes.
+Our progress was like this. But by practice we became so expert that
+without even awakening them we could spring lightly from the plump
+stomach of a black baby to its mother's shoulder, from there leap to
+the father's ribs, and rebound upon the rungs of the ladder.</p>
+
+<a name="img11" id="img11"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-11.jpg" width="500" height="318" alt="The Deliverance." title="The Deliverance." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The <i>Deliverance</i>. </p>
+
+<p>The river marched to the sea at the rate of four to five miles an
+hour. The <i>Deliverance</i> could make about nine knots an hour, so we
+travelled at the average rate of five miles; but for the greater
+part of each day we were tied to a bank while the boys went ashore
+and cut enough wood to carry us farther. And we never travelled at
+night. Owing to the changing currents, before the sun set we ran
+into shore and made fast to a tree. I explained how in America the
+river boats used search-lights, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span>and was told that on one boat the
+State had experimented with a searchlight, but that particular
+searchlight having got out of order the idea of night travelling was
+condemned.</p>
+
+<p>Ours was a most lazy progress, but one with the most beautiful
+surroundings and filled with entertainment. From our private box we
+looked out upon the most wonderful of panoramas. Sometimes we were
+closely hemmed in by mountains of light-green grass, except where,
+in the hollows, streams tumbled in tiny waterfalls between gigantic
+trees hung with strange flowering vines and orchids. Or we would
+push into great lakes of swirling brown water, dotted with flat
+islands overgrown with reed grass higher than the head of a man.
+Again the water turned blue and the trees on the banks grew into
+forests with the look of cultivated, well-cared-for parks, but with
+no sign of man, not even a mud hut or a canoe; only the strangest of
+birds and the great river beasts. Sometimes the sky was overcast and
+gray, the warm rain shut us in like a fog, and the clouds hid the
+peaks of the hills, or there would come a swift black tornado and
+the rain beat into our private box, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span>and each would sit crouched in
+his rain coat, while the engineer smothered his driving-rods in palm
+oil, and the great drops drummed down upon the awning and drowned
+the fire in our pipes. After these storms, as though it were being
+pushed up from below, the river seemed to rise in the centre, to
+become convex. By some optical illusion, it seemed to fall away on
+either hand to the depth of three or four feet.</p>
+
+<p>But as a rule we had a brilliant, gorgeous sunshine that made the
+eddying waters flash and sparkle, and caused the banks of sand to
+glare like whitewashed walls, and turn the sharp, hard fronds of the
+palms into glittering sword-blades. The movement of the boat
+tempered the heat, and in lazy content we sat in our lookout box and
+smiled upon the world. Except for the throb of the engine and the
+slow splash, splash, splash of the wheel there was no sound. We
+might have been adrift in the heart of a great ocean. So complete
+was the silence, so few were the sounds of man's presence, that at
+times one almost thought that ours was the first boat to disturb the
+Congo.</p>
+
+<p>Although we were travelling by boat, we <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span>spent as much time on land
+as on the water. Because the <i>Deliverance</i> burnt wood and, like an
+invading army, &quot;lived on the country,&quot; she was always stopping to
+lay in a supply. That gave Anfossi and myself a chance to visit the
+native villages or to hunt in the forest.</p>
+
+<p>To feed her steamers the State has established along the river-bank
+posts for wood, and in theory at these places there always is a
+sufficient supply of wood to carry a steamer to the next post. But
+our experience was either that another steamer had just taken all
+the wood or that the boys had decided to work no more and had hidden
+themselves in the bush. The State posts were &quot;clearings,&quot; less than
+one hundred yards square, cut out of the jungle. Sometimes only
+black men were in charge, but as a rule the <i>chef de poste</i> was a
+lonely, fever-ridden white, whose only interest in our arrival was
+his hope that we might spare him quinine. I think we gave away as
+many grains of quinine as we received logs of wood. Empty-handed we
+would turn from the wood post and steam a mile or so farther up the
+river, where we would run into a bank, and a boy with a steel hawser
+would leap overboard <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span>and tie up the boat to the roots of a tree.
+Then all the boys would disappear into the jungle and attack the
+primeval forest. Each was supplied with a machete and was expected
+to furnish a <i>bras</i> of wood. A <i>bras</i> is a number of sticks about as
+long and as thick as your arm, placed in a pile about three feet
+high and about three feet wide. To fix this measure the head boy
+drove poles into the bank three feet apart, and from pole to pole at
+the same distance from the ground stretched a strip of bark. When
+each boy had filled one of these openings all the wood was carried
+on board, and we would unhitch the <i>Deliverance</i>, and she would
+proceed to burn up the fuel we had just collected. It took the
+twenty boys about four hours to cut the wood, and the <i>Deliverance</i>
+the same amount of time to burn it. It was distinctly a
+hand-to-mouth existence. As I have pointed out, when it is too dark
+to see the currents, the Congo captains never attempt to travel. So
+each night at sunset Captain Jensen ran into the bank, and as soon
+as the plank was out all the black passengers and the crew passed
+down it and spent the night on shore. In five minutes the women
+would have <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span>the fires lighted and the men would be cutting grass
+for bedding and running up little shelters of palm boughs and
+hanging up linen strips that were both tents and mosquito nets.</p>
+
+<a name="img12" id="img12"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 290px;">
+<img src="images/img-12.jpg" width="290" height="450" alt="The Native Wife of a Chef de Poste."
+title="The Native Wife of a Chef de Poste." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Native Wife of a <i>Chef de Poste</i>. </p>
+
+<p>In the moonlight the natives with their camp-fires and torches made
+most wonderful pictures. Sometimes for their sleeping place the
+captain would select a glade in the jungle, or where a stream had
+cut a little opening in the forest, or a sandy island, with tall
+rushes on either side and the hot African moon shining on the white
+sand and turning the palms to silver, or they would pitch camp in a
+buffalo wallow, where the grass and mud had been trampled into a
+clay floor by the hoofs of hundreds of wild animals. But the fact
+that they were to sleep where at sunrise and at sunset came
+buffaloes, elephants, and panthers, disturbed the women not at all,
+and as they bent, laughing, over the iron pots, the firelight shone
+on their bare shoulders and was reflected from their white teeth and
+rolling eyes and brazen bangles.</p>
+
+<p>Until late in the night the goats would bleat, babies cry, and the
+&quot;boys&quot; and &quot;mammies&quot; talked, sang, quarrelled, beat tom-toms, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span>squeezed mournful groans out of the accordion of civilization. One
+would have thought we had anchored off a busy village rather than at
+a place where, before that night, the inhabitants had been only the
+beasts of the jungle and the river.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span>
+
+<h3>AMERICANS IN THE CONGO</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>In trying to sum up what I found in the Congo Free State, I think
+what one fails to find there is of the greatest significance. To
+tell what the place is like, you must tell what it lacks. One must
+write of the Congo always in the negative. It is as though you
+asked: &quot;What sort of a house is this one Jones has built?&quot; and were
+answered: &quot;Well, it hasn't any roof, and it hasn't any cellar, and
+it has no windows, floors, or chimneys. It's that kind of a house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When first I arrived in the Congo the time I could spend there
+seemed hopelessly inadequate. After I'd been there a month, it
+seemed to me that in a very few days any one could obtain a
+painfully correct idea of the place, and of the way it is
+administered. If an orchestra starts on an piece of music with all
+the instruments out of tune, it need not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span>play through the entire
+number for you to know that the instruments are out of tune.</p>
+
+<p>The charges brought against Leopold II, as King of the Congo, are
+three:</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) That he has made slaves of the twenty million blacks he
+promised to protect.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) That, in spite of his promise to keep the Congo open to trade,
+he has closed it to all nations.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) That the revenues of the country and all of its trade he has
+retained for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Any one who visits the Congo and remains only two weeks will be
+convinced that of these charges Leopold is guilty. In that time he
+will not see atrocities, but he will see that the natives are
+slaves, that no foreigner can trade with them, that in the interest
+of Leopold alone the country is milked.</p>
+
+<p>He will see that the government of Leopold is not a government. It
+preserves the perquisites and outward signs of government. It coins
+money, issues stamps, collects taxes. But it assumes none of the
+responsibilities of government. The Congo Free State is only a great
+trading house. And in it Leopold is the only wholesale and retail
+trader. He gives a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span>bar of soap for rubber, and makes a &quot;turn-over&quot;
+of a cup of salt for ivory. He is not a monarch. He is a shopkeeper.</p>
+
+<p>And were the country not so rich in rubber and ivory, were the
+natives not sweated so severely, he also would be a bankrupt
+shopkeeper. For the Congo is not only one vast trading post, but
+also it is a trading post badly managed. Even in the republics of
+Central America where the government changes so frequently, and
+where each new president is trying to make hay while he can, there
+is better administration, more is done for the people, the rights of
+other nations are better respected.</p>
+
+<p>Were the Congo properly managed, it would be one of the richest
+territories on the surface of the earth. As it is, through ignorance
+and cupidity, it is being despoiled and its people are the most
+wretched of human beings. In the White Book containing the reports
+of British vice-consuls on conditions in the Congo from April of
+last year to January of this year, Mr. Mitchell tells how the
+enslavement of the people still continues, how &quot;they&quot; (the
+conscripts, as they are <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span>called) &quot;are hunted in the forest by
+soldiers, and brought in chained by the neck like criminals.&quot; They
+then, though conscripted to serve in the army, are set to manual
+labor. They are slaves. The difference between the slavery under
+Leopold and the slavery under the Arab raiders is that the Arab was
+the better and kinder master. He took &quot;prisoners&quot; just as Leopold
+seizes &quot;conscripts,&quot; but he had too much foresight to destroy whole
+villages, to carry off all the black man's live stock, and to uproot
+his vegetable gardens. He purposed to return. And he did not wish to
+so terrify the blacks that to escape from him they would penetrate
+farther into the jungle. His motive was purely selfish, but his
+methods, compared with those of Leopold, were almost considerate.
+The work the State to-day requires of the blacks is so oppressive
+that they have no time, no heart, to labor for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>In every other colony&mdash;French, English, German&mdash;in the native
+villages I saw vegetable gardens, goats, and chickens, large,
+comfortable, three-room huts, fences, and, especially in the German
+settlement of the Cameroons <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span>at Duala, many flower gardens. In Bell
+Town at Duala I walked for miles through streets lined with such
+huts and gardens, and saw whole families, the very old as well as
+the very young, sitting contentedly in the shade of their trees, or
+at work in their gardens. In the Congo native villages I saw but one
+old person, of chickens or goats that were not to be given to the
+government as taxes I saw none, and the vegetable gardens, when
+there were any such, were cultivated for the benefit of the <i>chef de
+poste</i>, and the huts were small, temporary, and filthy. The dogs in
+the kennels on my farm are better housed, better fed, and much
+better cared for, whether ill or well, than are the twenty millions
+of blacks along the Congo River. And that these human beings are so
+ill-treated is due absolutely to the cupidity of one man, and to the
+apathy of the rest of the world. And it is due as much to the apathy
+and indifference of whoever may read this as to the silence of Elihu
+Root or Sir Edward Grey. No one can shirk his responsibility by
+sneering, &quot;Am I my brother's keeper?&quot; The Government of the United
+States and the thirteen other countries have promised <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span>to protect
+these people, to care for their &quot;material and moral welfare,&quot; and
+that promise is morally binding upon the people of those countries.
+How much Leopold cares for the material welfare of the natives is
+illustrated by the prices he pays the &quot;boys&quot; who worked on the
+government steamer in which I went up the Kasai. They were bound on
+a three months' voyage, and for each month's work on this trip they
+were given in payment their rice and eighty cents. That is, at the
+end of the trip they received what in our money would be equivalent
+to two dollars and forty cents. And that they did not receive in
+money, but in &quot;trade goods,&quot; which are worth about ten per cent less
+than their money value. So that of the two dollars and eighty cents
+that is due them, these black boys, who for three months sweated in
+the dark jungle cutting wood, are robbed by this King of twenty-four
+cents. One would dislike to grow rich at that price.</p>
+
+<a name="img13" id="img13"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-13.jpg" width="500" height="318" alt="English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges."
+title="English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges. </p>
+
+<p>In the French Congo I asked the traders at Libreville what they paid
+their boys for cutting mahogany. I found the price was four francs a
+day without &quot;chop,&quot; or three and a half <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span>francs with &quot;chop.&quot; That
+is, on one side of the river the French pay in cash for one day's
+work what Leopold pays in trade goods for the work of a month. As a
+result the natives run away to the French side, and often, I might
+almost say invariably, when at the <i>poste de bois</i> on the Congo side
+we would find two cords of wood, on the other bank at the post for
+the French boats we would count two hundred and fifty cords of wood.
+I took photographs of the native villages in all the colonies, in
+order to show how they compared&mdash;of the French and Belgian wood
+posts, the one well stocked and with the boys lying about asleep or
+playing musical instruments, or alert to trade and barter, and on
+the Belgian side no wood, and the unhappy white man alone, and
+generally shivering with fever. Had the photographs only developed
+properly they would have shown much more convincingly than one can
+write how utterly miserable is the condition of the Congo negro. And
+the condition of the white man at the wood posts is only a little
+better. We found one man absolutely without supplies. He was only
+twenty-four hours distant from Leopoldville, but no <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span>supplies had
+been sent him. He was ill with fever, and he could eat nothing but
+milk. Captain Jensen had six cans of condensed milk, which the State
+calculated should suffice for him and his passengers for three
+months. He turned the lot over to the sick man.</p>
+
+<p>We found another white man at the first wood post on the Kasai just
+above where it meets the Congo. He was in bed and dangerously ill
+with enteric fever. He had telegraphed the State at Leopoldville and
+a box of medicines had been sent to him; but the State doctors had
+forgotten to enclose any directions for their use. We were as
+ignorant of medicines as the man himself, and, as it was impossible
+to move him, we were forced to leave him lying in his cot with the
+row of bottles and tiny boxes, that might have given him life,
+unopened at his elbow. It was ten days before the next boat would
+touch at his post. I do not know that it reached him in time. One
+could tell dozens of such stories of cruelty to natives and of
+injustice and neglect to the white agents.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that Leopold has granted to American syndicates control
+over two great <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span>territories in the Congo may bring about a better
+state of affairs, and, in any event, it may arouse public interest
+in this country. It certainly should be of interest to Americans
+that some of the most prominent of their countrymen have gone into
+close partnership with a speculator as unscrupulous and as notorious
+as is Leopold, and that they are to exploit a country which as yet
+has been developed only by the help of slavery, with all its
+attendant evils of cruelty and torture.</p>
+
+<p>That Leopold has no right to give these concessions is a matter
+which chiefly concerns the men who are to pay for them, but it is an
+interesting fact.</p>
+
+<p>The Act of Berlin expressly states: <i>&quot;No Power which exercises, or
+shall exercise, sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions,
+shall be allowed to grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in
+matters of trade.&quot;</i></p>
+
+<p>Leopold is only a steward placed by the Powers over the Congo. He is
+a janitor. And he has no more authority to give even a foot of
+territory to Belgians, Americans, or Chinamen than the janitor of an
+apartment house has authority to fill the rooms with his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span>wife's
+relations or sell the coal in the basement.</p>
+
+<p>The charge that the present concessionaires have no title that any
+independent trader or miner need respect is one that is sure to be
+brought up when the Powers throw Leopold out, and begin to clean
+house. The concessionaires take a sporting chance that Leopold will
+not be thrown out. It should be remembered that it is to his and to
+their advantage to see that he is not.</p>
+
+<p>In November of 1906, Leopold gave the International Forestry and
+Mining Company of the Congo mining rights in territories adjoining
+his private park, the <i>Domaine de la Couronne</i>, and to the American
+Congo Company he granted the right to work rubber along the Congo
+River to where it joins the Kasai. This latter is a territory of
+four thousand square miles. The company also has the option within
+the next eleven years of buying land in any part of a district which
+is nearly one-half of the entire Congo. Of the Forestry and Mining
+Company one-half of the profits go to Leopold, one-fourth to
+Belgians, and the remaining fourth to the Americans. Of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span>profits
+of the American Congo Company, Leopold is entitled to one-half and
+the Americans to the other half. This company was one originally
+organized to exploit a new method of manufacturing crude rubber from
+the plant. The company was taken over by Thomas F. Ryan and his
+associates. Back of both companies are the Guggenheims, who are to
+perform the actual work in the mines and in the rubber plantation.
+Early in March a large number of miners and engineers were selected
+by John Hays Hammond, the chief engineer of the Guggenheim
+Exploration Companies, and A. Chester Beatty, and were sent to
+explore the territory granted in the mining concession. Another
+force of experts are soon to follow. The legal representative of the
+syndicates has stated that in the Congo they intend to move &quot;on
+commercial lines.&quot; By that we take it they mean they will give the
+native a proper price for his labor; and instead of offering
+&quot;bonuses&quot; and &quot;commissions&quot; to their white employees will pay them
+living wages. The exact terms of the concessions are wrapped in
+mystery. Some say the territories ceded to the concessionaires <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span>are
+to be governed by them, policed by them, and that within the
+boundaries of these concessions the Americans are to have absolute
+control. If this be so the syndicates are entering upon an
+experiment which for Americans is almost without precedent. They
+will be virtually what in England is called a chartered company,
+with the difference that the Englishmen receive their charter from
+their own government, while the charter under which the Americans
+will act will be granted by a foreign Power, and for what they may
+do in the Congo their own government could not hold them
+responsible. They are answerable only to the Power that issued the
+charter; and that Power is the just, the humane, the merciful
+Leopold.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the early days of chartered companies in Africa,
+notoriously those of the Congo, Northern Nigeria, Rhodesia, and
+German Central Africa does not make pleasant reading. But until the
+Americans in the Congo have made this experiment, it would be most
+unfair (except that the company they choose to keep leaves them open
+to suspicion) not to give them the benefit of the doubt. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span>One can at
+least say for them that they seem to be absolutely ignorant of the
+difficulties that lie before them. At least that is true of all of
+them to whom I have talked.</p>
+
+<p>The attorney of the Rubber Company when interviewed by a
+representative of a New York paper is reported to have said: &quot;We
+have purchased a privilege from a Sovereign State and propose to
+operate it along purely commercial lines. With King Leopold's
+management of Congo affairs in the past, or, with <i>what he may do in
+an administrative way in the future, we have absolutely nothing to
+do</i>.&quot; The italics are mine.</p>
+
+<p>When asked: &quot;Under your concessions are you given similar powers
+over the native blacks as are enjoyed by other concessionaires?&quot; the
+answer of the attorney, as reported, was: &quot;The problem of labor is
+not mentioned in the concession agreement, neither is the question
+of local administration. We are left to solve the labor problem in
+our own way, on a purely commercial basis, and with the question of
+government we have absolutely nothing whatever to do. The labor
+problem will not be formidable. Our mills are simple affairs. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span>One
+man can manage them, and the question of the labor on the rubber
+concession is reduced to the minimum.&quot; This answer of the learned
+attorney shows an ignorance of &quot;labor&quot; conditions in the Congo which
+is, unless assumed, absolutely abject.</p>
+
+<p>If the American syndicates are not to police and govern the
+territories ceded them, but if these territories are to continue to
+be administered by Leopold, it is not possible for the Americans to
+have &quot;absolutely nothing to do&quot; with that administration. Leopold's
+sole idea of administration is that every black man is his slave, in
+other words, the only men the Americans can depend upon for labor
+are slaves. Of the profits of these American companies Leopold is to
+receive one-half. He will work his rubber with slaves.</p>
+
+<p>Are the Americans going to use slaves also, or do they intend &quot;on
+commercial lines&quot; to pay those who work for them living wages? And
+if they do, at the end of the fiscal year, having paid a fair price
+for labor, are they prepared to accept a smaller profit than will
+their partner Leopold, who obtains his labor with the aid of a chain
+and a whip?</p>
+
+<a name="img14" id="img14"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 287px;">
+<img src="images/img-14.jpg" width="287" height="450" alt="The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+Concessionaires Must Depend." title="The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+Concessionaires Must Depend." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+Concessionaires Must Depend. </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span>The attorney for the company airily says: &quot;The labor problem will
+not be formidable.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>If the man knows what he is talking about, he can mean but one
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>The motives that led Leopold to grant these concessions are possibly
+various. The motives that induced the Americans to take his offer
+were probably less complicated. With them it was no question of
+politics. They wanted the money; they did not need it, for they all
+are rich&mdash;they merely wanted it. But Leopold wants more than the
+half profits he will obtain from the Americans. If the Powers should
+wake from their apathy and try to cast him out of the Congo, he
+wants, through his American partners, the help of the United States.
+Should he be &quot;dethroned,&quot; by granting these concessions now on a
+share and share alike basis with Belgians, French, and Americans, he
+still, through them, hopes to draw from the Congo a fair income. And
+in the meanwhile he looks to these Americans to kill any action
+against him that may be taken in our Senate and House of
+Representatives, even in the White House and Department of State.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span>For the last two years Chester A. Beatty has been visiting Leopold
+at Belgium, and has obtained the two concessions, and Leopold has
+obtained, or hopes he has obtained, the influence of many American
+shareholders. The fact that the people of the United States
+possessed no &quot;vested interest&quot; in the Congo was the important fact
+that placed any action on our part in behalf of that distressed
+country above suspicion. If we acted, we did so because the United
+States, as one of the signatory Powers of the Berlin Act, had
+promised to protect the natives of the Congo; and we could truly
+claim that we acted only in the name of humanity. Leopold has now
+robbed us of that claim. He hopes that the enormous power wielded by
+the Americans with whom he is associated, will prevent any action
+against him in this country.</p>
+
+<p>But the deal has already been made public, and the motives of those
+who now oppose improvement of conditions in the Congo, and who
+support Leopold, will be at once suspected.</p>
+
+<p>To me the most interesting thing about the tract of land ceded to
+Mr. Ryan, apart from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span>the number of hippopotamuses I saw on it, was
+that the people living along the Congo say that it is of no value.
+They told me that two years ago, after working it for some time,
+Leopold abandoned it as unprofitable, and they added that, when
+Leopold cannot whip rubber out of the forest, it is hard to believe
+that it can be obtained there legitimately by any one else. On the
+bank I saw the &quot;factories&quot; to which the unprofitable rubber had been
+carried from the interior. They had formerly belonged to Leopold,
+now they are the property of Mr. Ryan and of the American Congo
+Company. In only two years they already are in ruins, and the jungle
+has engulfed them.</p>
+
+<p>I was on the land owned by the company a dozen times or more, but I
+did not go into the interior. Even had I done so, I am not an expert
+on rubber, and would have understood nothing of Para trees, Lagos
+silk, and liane. I am speaking not of my own knowledge, only of what
+was told me by people who live on the spot. I found that this
+particular concession was well known, because, unlike the land given
+to the Forestry and Mines <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span>Company, it is not an inaccessible tract,
+but is situated only eight miles from Leopoldville. In our language,
+that is about as far as is the Battery to 160th Street. Leopoldville
+is the chief place on the Congo River, and every one there who spoke
+to me of the concession knew where it was situated, and repeated
+that it had been given up by Leopold as unprofitable, and that he
+had unloaded it on Mr. Ryan. They seem to think it very clever of
+the King to have got rid of it to the American millionaire. To one
+knowing Mr. Ryan only from what he reads of him in the public press,
+he does not seem to be the sort of man to whom Leopold could sell a
+worthless rubber plantation. However, it is a matter which concerns
+only Mr. Ryan and those who may think of purchasing shares in the
+company. The Guggenheims, who are to operate this rubber, say that
+Leopold did not know how to get out the full value of the land, and
+that they, by using the machinery they will install, will be able to
+make a profit, where Leopold, using only native labor, suffered a
+loss.</p>
+
+<p>To the poor the ways of the truly rich are past finding out. After a
+man has attained a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span>fortune sufficient to keep him in yachts and
+automobiles, one would think he could afford to indulge himself in
+the luxury of being squeamish; that as to where he obtained any
+further increase of wealth, he would prefer to pick and choose.</p>
+
+<p>On the contrary, these Americans go as far out of their way as
+Belgium to make a partner of the man who has wrung his money from
+wretched slaves, who were beaten, starved, and driven in chains.
+This concession cannot make them rich. It can only make them richer.
+And not richer in fact, for all the money they may whip out of the
+Congo could not give them one thing that they cannot now command,
+not an extra taste to the lips, not a fresh sensation, not one added
+power for good. To them it can mean only a figure in ink on a page
+of a bank-book. But what suffering, what misery it may mean to the
+slaves who put it there! Why should men as rich as these elect to go
+into partnership with one who sweats his dollars out of the naked
+black? How really fine, how really wonderful it would be if these
+same men, working together, decided to set free these twenty million
+people&mdash;if, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span>instead of joining hands with Leopold, they would
+overthrow him and march into the Congo free men, without his chain
+around their ankles, and open it to the trade of the world, and give
+justice and a right to live and to work and to sell and buy to
+millions of miserable human beings. These Americans working together
+could do it. They could do it from Washington. Or five hundred men
+with two Maxim guns could do it. The &quot;kingdom&quot; of the Congo is only
+a house of cards. Five hundred filibusters could take Boma, proclaim
+the Congo open to the traders of the world, as the Act of Berlin
+declares it to be, and in a day make of Leopold the jest of Europe.
+They would only be taking possession of what has always belonged to
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
+They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty,
+or crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven
+by any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
+degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
+risking <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span>life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows,
+and for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great.
+They had the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity.
+One of them picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the
+wrist of his tunic, and said: &quot;Look, it is our badge of shame.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
+home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men
+and brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will,
+safe in their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard
+King.</p>
+
+<p>What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
+Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
+possible, a greater evil?</p>
+
+<p>E.R. Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the
+improvement of the Congo, has written: &quot;It is a little difficult to
+imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of
+Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in
+slave-driving. The trouble is that they probably know nothing about
+African <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span>conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his
+detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis
+that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere
+'laborers' for the white man's benefit, possessing no rights in land
+nor in the produce of the soil. If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are
+going to acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by
+'commercial methods,' we welcome their advent. But we would point
+out to them that, in such a case, they had better at once abandon
+all idea of three or four hundred per cent dividends with which the
+wily autocrat at Brussels has doubtless primed them. No such
+monstrous profits are to be acquired in tropical Africa under a
+trade system. If, on the other hand, the methods they are prepared
+to adopt are the methods King Leopold and his other concessionaires
+have adopted for the past thirteen years, devastation and
+destruction, and the raising of more large bodies of soldiers, are
+their essential accompaniments; and the widening of the area of the
+Congo hell is assured.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise
+good to that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span>unhappy country are that our country is represented at
+Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the
+person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual
+work of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the
+Guggenheims. They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as
+philanthropists and humanitarians of the common-sense type. Like
+other rich men of their race, they have given largely to charity and
+to assist those less fortunate than themselves.</p>
+
+<p>For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they
+have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it
+successfully. Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with
+fairness.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why should you suppose,&quot; Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, &quot;that in
+the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly? In Mexico we found the
+natives ill-paid and ill-fed. We fed them and paid them well. Not
+from any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business. It is
+not good business to cut off a workman's hands or head. We are not
+ashamed of the way we have always treated <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span>our workmen, and in the
+Congo we are not going to spoil our record.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold,
+tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway
+to his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his
+agents might do there he could not possibly know. To this Mr.
+Guggenheim answered that &quot;Neither Leopold nor anyone else can
+dictate how we shall treat the native labor,&quot; that if his agents
+were cruel they would be instantly dismissed, and that for what
+occurred in the Congo on the land occupied by the American Congo
+Company his brothers and himself alone were responsible, and that
+they accepted that responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him
+into trouble, men of whose <i>dossiers</i> he is quite ignorant.</p>
+
+<p>From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several
+of his &quot;valets du roi,&quot; press agents, and tools, men who for years
+have been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the
+Americans, one, who is prominently <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span>exploited by the Belgians, had
+to leave Africa for theft.</p>
+
+<p>That Mr. Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the
+Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt. But that on
+Broadway, removed from the scene of operations in time some four to
+six months, and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can
+control the acts of his agents and his partners, remains to be
+proved. He is attacking a problem much more momentous than the
+handling of Mexican <i>peons</i> or Chinese coolies, and every step of
+the working out of this problem will be watched by the people of
+this country.</p>
+
+<p>And should they find that the example of the Belgian concessionaires
+in their treatment of the natives is being imitated by even one of
+the American Congo Company the people of this country will know it,
+and may the Lord have mercy on his soul!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span>
+
+<h3>HUNTING THE HIPPO</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Except once or twice in the Zoo, I never had seen a hippopotamus,
+and I was most anxious, before I left the Congo, to meet one. I
+wanted to look at him when he was free, and his own master, without
+iron bars or keepers; when he believed he was quite alone, and was
+enjoying his bath in peace and confidence. I also wanted to shoot
+him, and to hang in my ancestral halls his enormous head with the
+great jaws open and the inside of them painted pink and the small
+tusks hungrily protruding. I had this desire, in spite of the fact
+that for every hippo except the particular one whose head I coveted,
+I entertained the utmost good feeling.</p>
+
+<p>As a lad, among other beasts the hippopotamus had appealed to my
+imagination. Collectively, I had always looked upon them as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span>most
+charming people. They come of an ancient family. Two thousand four
+hundred years ago they were mentioned by Herodotus. And Herodotus to
+the animal kingdom is what Domesday Book is to the landed gentry. To
+exist beautifully for twenty-four hundred years without a single
+m&eacute;salliance, without having once stooped to trade, is certainly a
+strong title to nobility. Other animals by contact with man have
+become degraded. The lion, the &quot;King of Beasts,&quot; now rides a
+bicycle, and growls, as previously rehearsed, at the young woman in
+spangles, of whom he is secretly afraid. And the elephant, the
+monarch of the jungle, and of a family as ancient and noble as that
+of the hippopotamus, the monarch of the river, has become a beast of
+burden and works for his living. You can see him in Ph&oelig;nix Park
+dragging a road-roller, in Siam and India carrying logs, and at
+Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn. The
+royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.</p>
+
+<p>But, you never see a hippopotamus chained to a road-roller, or
+riding a bicycle. He is still the gentleman, the man of elegant
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span>leisure, the aristocrat of aristocrats, harming no one, and, in his
+ancestral river, living the simple life.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, I sought to kill him. At least, one of him, but only one.
+And, that I did not kill even one, while a bitter disappointment, is
+still a source of satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>In the Congo River we saw only two hippos, and both of them were
+dead. They had been shot from a steamer. If the hippo is killed in
+the water, it is impossible to recover the body at once. It sinks
+and does not rise, some say, for an hour, others say for seven
+hours. As in an hour the current may have carried the body four
+miles below where it sank, the steamer does not wait, and the
+destruction of the big beast is simple murder. There should be a law
+in the Congo to prevent their destruction, and, no doubt, if the
+State thought it could make a few francs out of protecting the
+hippo, as it makes many million francs by preserving the elephant,
+which it does for the ivory, such a law would exist. We soon saw
+many hippos, but although we could not persuade the only other
+passenger not to fire at them, there are a few hippos still alive in
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span>Congo. For, the only time the Captain and I were positive he
+hit anything, was when he fired over our heads and blew off the roof
+of the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>When first we saw the two dead hippos, one of them was turning and
+twisting so violently that we thought he was alive. But, as we drew
+near, we saw the strange convulsions were due to two enormous and
+ugly crocodiles, who were fiercely pulling at the body. Crocodiles
+being man-eaters, we had no feelings about shooting them, either in
+the water or up a tree; and I hope we hit them. In any event, after
+we fired the body drifted on in peace.</p>
+
+<p>On my return trip, going with the stream, when the boat covers about
+four times the distance she makes when steaming against it, I saw
+many hippos. In one day I counted sixty-nine. But on our way up the
+Congo, until we turned into the Kasai River, we saw none.</p>
+
+<p>So, on the first night we camped in the Kasai I had begun to think I
+never would see one, and I went ashore both skeptical and
+discouraged. We had stopped, not at a wood post, but at a place on
+the river's bank previously <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a>[122]</span>untouched by man, where there was a
+stretch of beach, and then a higher level with trees and tall
+grasses. Driven deep in this beach were the footprints of a large
+elephant. They looked as though some one had amused himself by
+sinking a bucket in the mud, and then pulling it out. For sixty
+yards I followed the holes and finally lost them in a confusion of
+other tracks. The place had been so trampled upon that it was beaten
+into a basin. It looked as though every animal in the Kasai had met
+there to hold a dance. There were the deep imprints of the hippos
+and the round foot of the elephant, with the marks of the big toes
+showing as clearly as though they had been scooped out of the mud
+with a trowel, the hoofs of buffalo as large as the shoe of a cart
+horse, and the arrow-like marks of the antelope, some in dainty
+little Vs, others measuring three inches across, and three inches
+from the base to the point. They came from every direction, down the
+bank and out of the river; and crossed and recrossed, and beneath
+the fresh prints that had been made that morning at sunrise, were
+those of days before rising up sharply out of the sun-dried clay,
+like <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a>[123]</span>bas-reliefs in stucco. I had gone ashore in a state of mind so
+skeptical that I was as surprised as Crusoe at the sight of
+footprints. It was as though the boy who did not believe in fairies
+suddenly stumbled upon them sliding down the moonbeams. One felt
+distinctly apologetic&mdash;as though uninvited he had pushed himself
+into a family gathering. At the same time there was the excitement
+of meeting in their own homes the strange peoples I had seen only in
+the springtime, when the circus comes to New York, in the basement
+of Madison Square Garden, where they are our pitiful prisoners,
+bruising their shoulders against bars. Here they were monarchs of
+all they surveyed. I was the intruder; and, looking down at the
+marks of the great paws and delicate hoofs, I felt as much out of
+place as would a grizzly bear in a Fifth Avenue club. And I behaved
+much as would the grizzly bear. I rushed back for my rifle intent on
+killing something.</p>
+
+<p>The sun had just set; the moon was shining faintly: it was the
+moment the beasts of the jungle came to the river to drink. Anfossi,
+although he had spent three years in the Congo and had three years'
+contract still to work out, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a>[124]</span>was as determined to kill something as
+was the tenderfoot from New York.</p>
+
+<p>Sixty yards from the stern of the <i>Deliverance</i> was the basin I had
+discovered; at an equal distance from her bow, a stream plunged into
+the river. Anfossi argued the hippos would prefer to drink the clear
+water of the stream, to the muddy water of the basin, and elected to
+watch at the stream. I carried a deck chair to the edge of my basin
+and placed it in the shadow of the trees. Anfossi went into our
+cabin for his rifle. At that exact moment a hippopotamus climbed
+leisurely out of the river and plunged into the stream. One of the
+soldiers on shore saw him and rushed for the boat. Anfossi sent my
+boy on the jump for me and, like a gentleman, waited until I had
+raced the sixty yards. But when we reached the stream there was
+nothing visible but the trampled grass and great holes in the mud
+and near us in the misty moonlight river something that puffed and
+blew slowly and luxuriously, as would any fat gentleman who had been
+forced to run for it. Had I followed Anfossi's judgment and gone
+along the bank sixty yards ahead, instead of sixty yards astern <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a>[125]</span>of
+the <i>Deliverance</i>, at the exact moment at which I sank into my deck
+chair, the hippo would have emerged at my feet. It is even betting
+as to which of us would have been the more scared.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, and for days after, we saw nothing but hippos. We saw
+them floating singly and in family groups, with generally four or
+five cows to one bull, and sometimes in front a baby hippo no larger
+than a calf, which the mother with her great bulk would push against
+the swift current, as you see a tugboat in the lee of a great liner.
+Once, what I thought was a spit of rocks suddenly tumbled apart and
+became twenty hippos, piled more or less on top of each other.
+During that one day, as they floated with the current, enjoying
+their afternoon's nap, we saw thirty-four. They impressed me as the
+most idle, and, therefore, the most aristocratic of animals. They
+toil not, neither do they spin; they had nothing to do but float in
+the warm water and the bright sunshine; their only effort was to
+open their enormous jaws and yawn luxuriously, in the pure content
+of living, in absolute boredom. They reminded you only of fat gouty
+old <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a>[126]</span>gentlemen, puffing and blowing in the pool at the Warm Springs.</p>
+
+<p>The next chance we had at one of them on shore came on our first
+evening in the Kasai just before sunset. Captain Jensen was steering
+for a flat island of sand and grass where he meant to tie up for the
+night. About fifty yards from the spot for which we were making, was
+the only tree on the island, and under it with his back to us, and
+leisurely eating the leaves of the lower branches, exactly as though
+he were waiting for us by appointment, was a big gray hippo. His
+back being toward us, we could not aim at his head, and he could not
+see us. But the <i>Deliverance</i> is not noiseless, and, hearing the
+paddle-wheel, the hippo turned, saw us, and bolted for the river.
+The hippopotamus is as much at home in the water as the seal. To get
+to the water, if he is surprised out of it, and to get under it, if
+he is alarmed while in it, is instinct. If he does venture ashore,
+he goes only a few rods from the bank and then only to forage. His
+home is the river, and he rushes to bury himself in it as naturally
+as the squirrel makes for a tree. This particular hippo ran for the
+river as fast <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a>[127]</span>as a horse coming at a slow trot. He was a very badly
+scared hippo. His head was high in the air, his fat sides were
+shaking, and the one little eye turned toward us was filled with
+concern. Behind him the yellow sun was setting into the lagoons. On
+the flat stretch of sand he was the only object, and against the
+horizon loomed as large as a freight car. That must be why we both
+missed him. I tried to explain that the reason I missed him was
+that, never before having seen so large an animal running for his
+life, I could not watch him do it and look at the gun sights. No one
+believed that was why I missed him. I did not believe it myself. In
+any event neither of us hit his head, and he plunged down the bank
+to freedom, carrying most of the bank with him. But, while we still
+were violently blaming each other, at about two hundred yards below
+the boat, he again waddled out of the river and waded knee deep up
+the little stream. Keeping the bunches of grass between us, I ran up
+the beach, aimed at his eye and this time hit him fairly enough.
+With a snort he rose high in the air, and so, for an instant,
+balanced his enormous bulk. The action was like that of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a>[128]</span>a horse
+that rears on his hind legs, when he is whipped over the nose. And
+apparently my bullet hurt him no more than the whip the horse, for
+he dropped heavily to all fours, and again disappeared into the
+muddy river. Our disappointment and chagrin were intense, and at
+once Anfossi and I organized a hunt for that evening. To encourage
+us, while we were sitting on the bridge making a hasty dinner,
+another hippopotamus had the impertinence to rise, blowing like a
+whale, not ten feet from where we sat. We could have thrown our tin
+cups and hit him; but he was in the water, and now we were seeking
+only those on land.</p>
+
+<a name="img15" id="img15"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 324px;">
+<img src="images/img-15.jpg" width="324" height="450" alt="Mr. Davis and Native &quot;Boy,&quot; on the Kasai River."
+title="Mr. Davis and Native &quot;Boy,&quot; on the Kasai River." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Mr. Davis and Native &quot;Boy,&quot; on the Kasai River. </p>
+
+<p>Two years ago when the atrocities along the Kasai made the natives
+fear the white man and the white man fear the natives, each of the
+river boats was furnished with a stand of Albini rifles. Three of
+the black soldiers, who were keen sportsmen, were served with these
+muskets, and as soon as the moon rose, the soldiers and Anfossi, my
+black boy, with an extra gun, and I set forth to clear the island of
+hippos. To the stranger it was a most curious hunt. The island was
+perfectly flat and bare, and the river had eaten into it and
+overflowed it with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a>[129]</span>tiny rivulets and deep, swift-running streams.
+Into these rivulets and streams the soldiers plunged, one in front,
+feeling the depth of the water with a sounding rod, and as he led we
+followed. The black men made a splendid picture. They were naked but
+for breech-cloths, and the moonlight flashed on their wet skins and
+upon the polished barrels of the muskets. But, as a sporting
+proposition, as far as I could see, we had taken on the hippopotamus
+at his own game. We were supposed to be on an island, but the water
+was up to our belts and running at five miles an hour. I could not
+understand why we had not openly and aboveboard walked into the
+river. Wading waist high in the water with a salmon rod I could
+understand, but not swimming around in a river with a gun. The force
+of the shallowest stream was the force of the great river behind it,
+and wherever you put your foot, the current, on its race to the sea,
+annoyed at the impediment, washed the sand from under the sole of
+your foot and tugged at your knees and ankles. To add to the
+interest the three soldiers held their muskets at full cock, and as
+they staggered for a footing each pointed his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a>[130]</span>gun at me. There also
+was a strange fish about the size of an English sole that sprang out
+of the water and hurled himself through space. Each had a white
+belly, and as they skimmed past us in the moonlight it was as though
+some one was throwing dinner plates. After we had swum the length of
+the English Channel, we returned to the boat. As to that midnight
+hunt I am still uncertain as to whether we were hunting the hippos
+or the hippos were hunting us.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning we had our third and last chance at a hippo.</p>
+
+<p>It is distinctly a hard-luck story. We had just gone on the bridge
+for breakfast when we saw him walking slowly from us along an island
+of white sand as flat as your hand, and on which he loomed large as
+a haystack. Captain Jensen was a true sportsman. He jerked the bell
+to the engine-room, and at full speed the <i>Deliverance</i> raced for
+the shore. The hippo heard us, and, like a baseball player caught
+off base, tried to get back to the river. Captain Jensen danced on
+the deck plates:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Schoot it! schoot it!&quot; he yelled, &quot;Gotfurdamn! schoot it!&quot; When
+Anfossi and I fired, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a>[131]</span>the <i>Deliverance</i> was a hundred yards from the
+hippo, and the hippo was not five feet from the bank. In another
+instant, he would have been over it and safe. But when we fired, he
+went down as suddenly as though a safe had dropped on him. Except
+that he raised his head, and rolled it from side to side, he
+remained perfectly still. From his actions, or lack of actions, it
+looked as though one of the bullets had broken his back; and when
+the blacks saw he could not move they leaped and danced and
+shrieked. To them the death of the big beast promised much chop.</p>
+
+<p>But Captain Jensen was not so confident. &quot;Schoot it,&quot; he continued
+to shout, &quot;we lose him yet! Gotfurdamn! schoot it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My gun was an American magazine rifle, holding five cartridges. We
+now were very near the hippo, and I shot him in the head twice, and,
+once, when he opened them, in the jaws. At each shot his head would
+jerk with a quick toss of pain, and at the sight the blacks screamed
+with delight that was primitively savage. After the last shot, when
+Captain Jensen had brought the <i>Deliverance</i> broadside to the bank,
+the hippo ceased to move. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a>[132]</span>boat had not reached the shore before
+the boys with the steel hawser were in the water; the gangplank was
+run out, and the black soldiers and wood boys, with their knives,
+were dancing about the hippo and hacking at his tail. Their idea was
+to make him the more quickly bleed to death. I ran to the cabin for
+more cartridges. It seemed an absurd precaution. I was as sure I had
+the head of that hippo as I was sure that my own was still on my
+neck. My only difficulty was whether to hang the head in the front
+hall or in the dining-room. It might be rather too large for the
+dining-room. That was all that troubled me. After three minutes,
+when I was back on deck, the hippo still lay immovable. Certainly
+twenty men were standing about him; three were sawing off his tail,
+and the women were chanting triumphantly a song they used to sing in
+the days when the men were allowed to hunt, and had returned
+successful with food.</p>
+
+<p>On the bridge was Anfossi with his camera. Before the men had
+surrounded the hippo he had had time to snap one picture of it. I
+had just started after my camera, when from the blacks there was a
+yell of alarm, of rage, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a>[133]</span>amazement. The hippo had opened his
+eyes and raised his head. I shoved the boys out of the way, and,
+putting the gun close to his head, fired pointblank. I wanted to put
+him out of pain. I need not have distressed myself. The bullet
+affected him no more than a quinine pill. What seemed chiefly to
+concern him, what apparently had brought him back to life, was the
+hacking at his tail. That was an indignity he could not brook.</p>
+
+<p>His expression, and he had a perfectly human expression, was one of
+extreme annoyance and of some slight alarm, as though he were
+muttering: &quot;This is no place for <i>me</i>,&quot; and, without more ado, he
+began to roll toward the river. Without killing some one, I could
+not again use the rifle. The boys were close upon him, prying him
+back with the gangplank, beating him with sticks of firewood, trying
+to rope him with the steel hawser. On the bridge Captain Jensen and
+Anfossi were giving orders in Danish and Italian, and on the bank I
+swore in American. Everybody shoved and pushed and beat at the great
+bulk, and the great bulk rolled steadily on. We might as well have
+tried to budge the Fifth Avenue <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a>[134]</span>Hotel. He reached the bank, he
+crushed it beneath him, and, like a suspension bridge, splashed into
+the water. Even then, we who watched him thought he would stick fast
+between the boat and the bank, that the hawser would hold him. But
+he sank like a submarine, and we stood gaping at the muddy water and
+saw him no more. When I recovered from my first rage I was glad he
+was still alive to float in the sun and puff and blow and open his
+great jaws in a luxurious yawn. I could imagine his joining his
+friends after his meeting with us, and remarking in reference to our
+bullets: &quot;I find the mosquitoes are quite bad this morning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With this chapter is published the photograph Anfossi took, from the
+deck of the steamer, of our hippo&mdash;the hippo that was too stupid to
+know when he was dead. It is not a good photograph, but of our hippo
+it is all we have to show. I am still undecided whether to hang it
+in the hall or the dining-room.
+</p>
+
+<a name="img16" id="img16"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-16.jpg" width="500" height="345" alt="The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead."
+title="The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead. </p>
+
+<p>The days I spent on my trip up the river were of delightful
+sameness, sunshine by day, with the great panorama drifting past,
+and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a>[135]</span>quiet nights of moonlight. For diversion, there were many
+hippos, crocodiles, and monkeys, and, though we saw only their
+tracks and heard them only in the jungle, great elephants. And
+innumerable strange birds&mdash;egrets, eagles, gray parrots, crimson
+cranes, and giant flamingoes&mdash;as tall as a man and from tip to tip
+measuring eight feet.</p>
+
+<p>Each day the programme was the same. The arrival at the wood post,
+where we were given only excuses and no wood, and where once or
+twice we unloaded blue cloth and bags of salt, which is the currency
+of the Upper Congo, and the halt for hours to cut wood in the
+forest.</p>
+
+<p>Once we stopped at a mission and noted the contrast it made with the
+bare, unkempt posts of the State. It was the Catholic mission at
+Wombali, and it was a beauty spot of flowers, thatched houses,
+grass, and vegetables. There was a brickyard, and schools, and
+sewing-machines, and the blacks, instead of scowling at us, nodded
+and smiled and looked happy and contented. The Father was a great
+red-bearded giant, who seemed to have still stored up in him all the
+energy of the North. While <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a>[136]</span>the steamer was unloaded he raced me
+over the vegetable garden and showed me his farm. I had seen other
+of the Catholic Missions, and I spoke of how well they looked, of
+the signs they gave of hard work, and of consideration for the
+blacks.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am not of that Order,&quot; the Father said gravely. He was speaking
+in English, and added, as though he expected some one to resent it:
+&quot;We are Jesuits.&quot; No one resented it, and he added: &quot;We have our
+Order in your country. Do you know Fordham College?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Did I know it? If you are trying to find our farm, the automobile
+book tells you to leave Fordham College on your left after Jerome
+Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course, I know it,&quot; I said. &quot;They have one of the best baseball
+nines near New York; they play the Giants every spring.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Father started.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They play with Giants!&quot; he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>I did not know how to say &quot;baseball nines&quot; in French, but at least
+he was assured that whatever it was, it was one of the best near New
+York.</p>
+
+<p>Then Captain Jensen's little black boy ran <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a>[137]</span>up to tell me the
+steamer was waiting, and began in Bangalese to beg something of the
+Father. The priest smiled and left us, returning with a rosary and
+crucifix, which the boy hung round his neck, and then knelt, and the
+red-bearded Father laid his fingers on the boy's kinky head. He was
+a very happy boy over his new possession, and it was much coveted by
+all the others. One of the black mammies, to ward off evil from the
+little naked baby at her breast, offered an arm's length of blue
+cloth for &quot;the White Man's fetish.&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img17" id="img17"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-17.jpg" width="500" height="304" alt="The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission."
+title="The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission. </p>
+
+<p>My voyage up the Kasai ended at Dima, the headquarters of the Kasai
+Concession. I had been told that at Dima I would find a rubber
+plantation, and I had gone there to see it. I found that the
+plantation was four days distant, and that the boat for the
+plantation did not start for six days. I also had been told by the
+English missionaries at Dima, that I would find an American mission.
+When I reached Dima I learned that the American mission was at a
+station further up the river, which could not be reached sooner than
+a month. That is the sort of information upon which in the Congo
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a>[138]</span>one is forced to regulate his movements. As there was at Dima
+neither mission nor plantation, and as the only boat that would
+leave it in ten days was departing the next morning, I remained
+there only one night. It was a place cut out of the jungle, two
+hundred yards square, and of all stations I saw in the Congo, the
+best managed. It is the repair shop for the steamers belonging to
+the Kasai Concession, as well as the headquarters of the company and
+the residence of the director, M. Dryepoint. He and Van Damme seemed
+to be the most popular officials in the Congo. M. Dryepoint was up
+the river, so I did not meet him, but I was most courteously and
+hospitably entertained by M. Fumi&egrave;re. He gave me a whole house to
+myself, and personally showed me over his small kingdom. All the
+houses were of brick, and the paths and roads were covered with
+gravel and lined with flowers. Nothing in the Congo is more curious
+than this pretty town of suburban villas and orderly machine shops;
+with the muddy river for a street and the impenetrable jungle for a
+back yard. The home of the director at Dima is the proud boast of
+the entire Congo. And all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a>[139]</span>they say of it is true. It did have a
+billiard table and ice, and a piano, and M. Fumi&egrave;re invited me to
+join his friends at an excellent dinner. In furnishing this
+celebrated house, the idea had apparently been to place in it the
+things one would least expect to find in the jungle, or, without
+wishing to be ungracious, anywhere. So, although there are no women
+at Dima, there are great mirrors in brass frames, chandeliers of
+glass with festoons and pendants of glass, metal lamps with shades
+of every color, painted plaster statuettes and carved silk-covered
+chairs. In the red glow of the lamps, surrounded by these Belgian
+atrocities, M. Fumi&egrave;re sat down to the pianola. The heat of Africa
+filled the room; on one side we could have touched the jungle, on
+the other in the river the hippopotamus puffed and snorted. M.
+Fumi&egrave;re pulled out the stops, and upon the heat and silence of the
+night, floated the &quot;Evening Star,&quot; Mascagni's &quot;Intermezzo,&quot; and
+&quot;Chin-chin Chinaman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Next morning I left for Leopoldville in a boat much larger than the
+<i>Deliverance</i>, but with none of her cheer or good-fellowship. This
+boat was run by the black wife of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a>[140]</span>captain. Trailing her velvet
+gown, and cleaning her teeth with a stick of wood, she penetrated to
+every part of the steamer, making discipline impossible and driving
+the crew out of control.</p>
+
+<p>I was glad to escape at Kinchassa to the clean and homelike bungalow
+and beautiful gardens of the only Englishman still in the employ of
+the State, Mr. Cuthbert Malet, who gave me hospitably of his scanty
+store of &quot;Scotch,&quot; and, what was even more of a sacrifice, of his
+precious handful of eggs. A week later I was again in Boma, waiting
+for the <i>Nigeria</i> to take me back to Liverpool.</p>
+
+<p>Before returning to the West Coast and leaving the subject of the
+Congo, I wish to testify to what seemed to me the enormously
+important work that is being done by the missionaries. I am not
+always an admirer of the missionary. Some of those one meets in
+China and Japan seem to be taking much more interest in their own
+bodies than in the souls of others. But, in the Congo, almost the
+only people who are working in behalf of the natives are those
+attached to the missions. Because they bear witness against Leopold,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a>[141]</span>much is said by his hired men and press agents against them. But
+they are deserving of great praise. Some of them are narrow and
+bigoted, and one could wish they were much more tolerant of their
+white brothers in exile, but compared with the good they do, these
+faults count for nothing. It is due to them that Europe and the
+United States know the truth about the Congo. They were the first to
+bear witness, and the hazardous work they still are doing for their
+fellow men is honest, practical Christianity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a>[142]</span>
+
+<h3>OLD CALABAR</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>While I was up the Congo and the Kasai rivers, Mrs. Davis had
+remained at Boma, and when I rejoined her, we booked passage home on
+the <i>Nigeria</i>. We chose the <i>Nigeria</i>, which is an Elder-Dempster
+freight and passenger steamer, in preference to the fast mail
+steamer because of the ports of the West Coast we wished to see as
+many as possible. And, on her six weeks' voyage to Liverpool, the
+<i>Nigeria</i> promised to spend as much time at anchor as at sea. On the
+Coast it is a more serious matter to reserve a cabin than in New
+York. You do not stop at an uptown office, and on a diagram of the
+ship's insides, as though you were playing roulette, point at a
+number. Instead, as you are to occupy your cabin, not for one, but
+for six, weeks, you search, as vigilantly as a navy officer looking
+for contraband, the ship herself and each cabin.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a>[143]</span>But going aboard was a simple ceremony. The H&ocirc;tel Splendide stands
+on the bank of the Congo River. After saying &quot;Good-by&quot; to her
+proprietor, I walked to the edge of the water and waved my helmet.
+In the Congo, a white man standing in the sun without a hat is a
+spectacle sufficiently thrilling to excite the attention of all, and
+at once Captain Hughes of the <i>Nigeria</i> sent a cargo boat to the
+rescue, and on the shoulders of naked Kroo boys Mrs. Davis and the
+maid, and the trunks, spears, tents, bathtubs, carved idols, native
+mats, and a live mongoos were dropped into it, and we were paddled
+to the gangway.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If that's all, we might as well get under way,&quot; said Captain
+Hughes. The anchor chains creaked, from the bank the proprietor of
+the Splendide waved his hand, and the long voyage to Liverpool had
+begun. It was as casual as halting and starting a cable-car.</p>
+
+<p>According to schedule, after leaving the Congo, we should have gone
+south and touched at Loanda. But on this voyage, outward bound, the
+<i>Nigeria</i> had carried, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a>[144]</span>to help build the railroad at Lobito Bay, a
+deckload of camels. They had proved trying passengers, and instead
+of first touching at the Congo, Captain Hughes had continued on
+south and put them ashore. So we were robbed of seeing both Loanda
+and the camels.</p>
+
+<p>This line, until Calabar is reached, carries but few passengers,
+and, except to receive cargo, the ship is not fully in commission.
+During this first week she is painted, and holystoned, her carpets
+are beaten, her cabins scrubbed and aired, and the passengers mess
+with the officers. So, of the ship's life, we acquired an intimate
+knowledge, her interests became our own, and the necessity of
+feeding her gaping holds with cargo was personal and acute. On a
+transatlantic steamer, when once the hatches are down, the captain
+need think only of navigation; on these coasters, the hatches never
+are down, and the captain, that sort of captain dear to the heart of
+the owners, is the man who fills the holds.</p>
+
+<p>A skipper going ashore to drum up trade was a novel spectacle.
+Imagine the captain of one of the Atlantic greyhounds prying among
+the warehouses on West Street, demanding of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span>the merchants:
+&quot;Anything going my way, this trip?&quot; He would scorn to do it. Before
+his passengers have passed the custom officers, he is in mufti, and
+on his way to his villa on Brooklyn Heights, or to the Lambs Club,
+and until the Blue Peter is again at the fore, little he cares for
+passengers, mails, or cargo. But the captain of a &quot;coaster&quot; must be
+sailor and trader, too. He is expected to navigate a coast, the
+latest chart of which is dated somewhere near 1830, and at which the
+waves rush in walls of spray, sometimes as high as a three-story
+house. He must speak all the known languages of Europe, and all the
+unknown tongues of innumerable black brothers. At each port he must
+entertain out of his own pocket the agents of all the trading
+houses, and, in his head, he must keep the market price, &quot;when laid
+down in Liverpool,&quot; of mahogany, copra, copal, rubber, palm oil, and
+ivory. To see that the agent has not overlooked a few bags of ground
+nuts, or a dozen puncheons of oil, he must go on shore and peer into
+the compound of each factory, and on board he must keep peace
+between the Kroo boys and the black deck passengers, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a>[146]</span>and see that
+the white passengers with a temperature of 105, do not drink more
+than is good for them. At least, those are a few of the duties the
+captains on the ships controlled by Sir Alfred Jones, who is Elder
+and Dempster, are expected to perform. No wonder Sir Alfred is
+popular.</p>
+
+<p>Our first port of call was Landana, in Portuguese territory, but two
+ships of the Woermann Line were there ahead of us and had gobbled up
+all the freight. So we could but up anchor and proceed to
+Libreville, formerly the capital of the French Congo. At five in the
+morning by the light of a ship's lantern, we were paddled ashore to
+drum up trade. We found two traders, Ives and Thomas, who had
+waiting for the <i>Nigeria</i> at the mouth of the Gabun River six
+hundred logs of mahogany, and, in consequence, there was general
+rejoicing, and Scotch and &quot;sparklets,&quot; and even music from a German
+music-box that would burst into song only after it had been fed with
+a copper. One of the clerks said that Ives had forgotten how to
+extract the coppers and in consequence was using the music-box as a
+savings bank.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a>[147]</span>In the French Congo the natives are permitted to trade; in the
+Congo Free State they are not, or, rather, they have nothing with
+which to trade, and the contrast between the empty &quot;factories&quot; of
+the Congo and those of Libreville, crowded with natives buying and
+selling, was remarkable. There also was a conspicuous difference in
+the quality and variety of the goods. In Leopold's Congo &quot;trade&quot;
+goods is a term of contempt. It describes articles manufactured only
+for those who have no choice and must accept whatever is offered.
+When your customers must take what you please to give them the
+quality of your goods is likely to deteriorate. Salt of the poorest
+grade, gaudy fabrics that neither &quot;wear&quot; nor &quot;wash,&quot; bars of coarse
+soap (the native is continually washing his single strip of cloth),
+and axe-heads made of iron, are what Leopold thinks are a fair
+exchange for the forced labor of the black.</p>
+
+<p>But the articles I found in the factories in Libreville were what,
+in the Congo, are called &quot;white man's goods&quot; and were of excellent
+quality and in great variety. There were even French novels and
+cigars. Some of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a>[148]</span>latter, called the Young American on account of
+the name and the flag on the lid, tempted me, until I saw they were
+manufactured by Dusseldorffer and Vanderswassen, and one suspected
+Rotterdam.</p>
+
+<p>In Ives's factory I saw for the first time a &quot;trade&quot; rifle, or Tower
+musket. In the vernacular of the Coast, they are &quot;gas-pipe&quot; guns.
+They are put together in England, and to a white man are a most
+terrifying weapon. The original Tower muskets, such as, in the days
+of '76, were hung over the fireplace of the forefathers of the Sons
+of the Revolution, were manufactured in England, and stamped with
+the word &quot;Tower,&quot; and for the reigning king G.R. I suppose at that
+date at the Tower of London there was an arsenal; but I am ready to
+be corrected. To-day the guns are manufactured at Birmingham, but
+they still have the flint lock, and still are stamped with the word
+&quot;Tower&quot; and the royal crown over the letters G.R., and with the
+arrow which is supposed to mark the property of the government. The
+barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore is that of an
+artesian well. The native fills four inches of this <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a>[149]</span>cavity with
+powder and the remaining three feet with rusty nails, barbed wire,
+leaden slugs, and the legs and broken parts of iron pots. An officer
+of the W.A.F.F.'s, in a fight in the bush in South Nigeria, had one
+of these things fired at him from a distance of fifteen feet. He
+told me all that saved him was that when the native pulled the
+trigger the recoil of the gun &quot;kicked&quot; the muzzle two feet in the
+air and the native ten feet into the bush. I bought a Tower rifle at
+the trade price, a pound, and brought it home. But although my
+friends have offered to back either end of the gun as being the more
+destructive, we have found no one with a sufficient sporting spirit
+to determine the point.</p>
+
+<p>Libreville is a very pretty town, but when it was laid out the
+surveyors just missed placing the Equator in its main street. It is
+easy to understand why with such a live wire in the vicinity
+Libreville is warm. From the same cause it also is rich in flowers,
+vines, and trees growing in generous, undisciplined abundance,
+making of Libreville one vast botanical garden, and burying the town
+and its bungalows <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a>[150]</span>under screens of green and branches of scarlet
+and purple flowers. Close to the surf runs an avenue bordered by
+giant cocoanut palms and, after the sun is down, this is the
+fashionable promenade. Here every evening may be seen in their
+freshest linen the six married white men of Libreville, and, in the
+latest Paris frocks, the six married ladies, while from the verandas
+of the factories that line the sea front and from under the paper
+lanterns of the Caf&eacute; Guion the clerks and traders sip their absinthe
+and play dominoes, and cast envious glances at the six fortunate
+fellow exiles.</p>
+
+<p>For several days we lay a few miles south of Libreville, off the
+mouth of the Gabun River, taking in the logs of mahogany. It was a
+continuous performance of the greatest interest. I still do not
+understand why all those engaged in it were not drowned, or pounded
+to a pulp. Just before we touched at the Gabun River, two tramp
+steamers, chartered by Americans, carried off a full cargo of this
+mahogany to the States. It was an experiment the result of which the
+traders of Libreville are awaiting with interest. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a>[151]</span>The mahogany that
+the reader sees in America probably comes from Hayti, Cuba, or
+Belize, and is of much finer quality than that of the Gabun River,
+which latter is used for making what the trade calls &quot;fancy&quot;
+cigar-boxes and cheap furniture. But before it becomes a cigar-box
+it passes through many adventures. Weeks before the steamer arrives
+the trader, followed by his black boys, explores the jungle and
+blazes the trees. Then the boys cut trails through the forest, and,
+using logs for rollers, drag and push the tree trunks to the bank of
+the river. There the tree is cut into huge cubes, weighing about a
+ton, and measuring twelve to fifteen feet in length and three feet
+across each face. A boy can &quot;shape&quot; one of these logs in a day.</p>
+
+<p>Although his pay varies according to whether the tributaries of the
+river are full or low, so making the moving of the logs easy or
+difficult, he can earn about three pounds ten shillings a month,
+paid in cash. Compared with the eighty cents a month paid only a few
+miles away in the Congo Free State, and in &quot;trade&quot; goods, these are
+good wages. When the log is shaped the mark of the trader is branded
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a>[152]</span>on it with an iron, just as we brand cattle, and it is turned loose
+on the river. At the mouth of the river there is little danger of
+the log escaping, for the waves are stronger than the tide, and
+drive the logs upon the shore. There, in the surf, we found these
+tons of mahogany pounding against each other. In the ship's
+steam-launch were iron chains, a hundred yards long, to which, at
+intervals, were fastened &quot;dogs,&quot; or spikes. These spikes were driven
+into the end of a log, the brand upon the log was noted by the
+captain and trader, and the logs, chained together like the vertebr&aelig;
+of a great sea serpent, were towed to the ship's side. There they
+were made fast, and three Kroo boys knocked the spike out of each
+log, warped a chain around it, and made fast that chain to the steel
+hawser of the winch. As it was drawn to the deck a Senegalese
+soldier, acting for the Customs, gave it a second blow with a
+branding hammer, and, thundering and smashing, it swung into the
+hold.</p>
+
+<a name="img18" id="img18"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 333px;">
+<img src="images/img-18.jpg" width="333" height="450" alt="There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+Pounding Against Each Other." title="There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+Pounding Against Each Other." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+Pounding Against Each Other. </p>
+
+<p>In the &quot;round up&quot; of the logs the star performers were the three
+Kroo boys at the ship's side. For days, in fascinated horror, the
+six passengers watched them, prayed for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a>[153]</span>them, and made bets as to
+which would be the first to die. One understands that a Kroo boy is
+as much at home in the sea as on shore, but these boys were neither
+in the sea nor on shore. They were balancing themselves on blocks of
+slippery wood that weighed a ton, but which were hurled about by the
+great waves as though they were life-belts. All night the hammering
+of the logs made the ship echo like a monster drum, and all day
+without an instant's pause each log reared and pitched, spun like a
+barrel, dived like a porpoise, or, broadside, battered itself
+against the iron plates. But, no matter what tricks it played, a
+Kroo boy rode it as easily as though it were a horse in a
+merry-go-round.</p>
+
+<p>It was a wonderful exhibition. It furnished all the thrills that one
+gets when watching a cowboy on a bucking bronco, or a trained seal.
+Again and again a log, in wicked conspiracy with another log, would
+plan to entice a Kroo boy between them, and smash him. At the sight
+the passengers would shriek a warning, the boy would dive between
+the logs, and a mass of twelve hundred pounds of mahogany would
+crash against a mass <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a>[154]</span>weighing fifteen hundred with a report like
+colliding freight cars.</p>
+
+<p>And then, as, breathless, we waited to see what once was a Kroo boy
+float to the surface, he would appear sputtering and grinning, and
+saying to us as clearly as a Kroo smile can say it: &quot;He never
+touched me!&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img19" id="img19"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 376px;">
+<img src="images/img-19.jpg" width="376" height="450" alt="A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains."
+title="A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains. </p>
+
+<p>Two days after we had stored away the mahogany we anchored off
+Duala, the capital of the German Cameroons. Duala is built upon a
+high cliff, and from the water the white and yellow buildings with
+many pillars gave it the appearance of a city. Instead, it is a
+clean, pretty town. With the German habit of order, it has been laid
+out like barracks, but with many gardens, well-kept, shaded streets,
+and high, cool houses, scientifically planned to meet the
+necessities of the tropics. At Duala the white traders and officials
+were plump and cheerful looking, and in the air there was more of
+prosperity than fever. The black and white sentry boxes and the
+native soldiers practising the stork march of the Kaiser's army were
+signs of a rigid military rule, but the signs of Germany's efforts
+in trade were more conspicuous. No<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a>[155]</span>where on the coast did we see as
+at Duala such gorgeous offices as those of the great trading house
+of Woermann, the hated rivals of &quot;Sir Alfred,&quot; such carved
+furniture, such shining brass railings, and nowhere else did we see
+plate-glass windows, in which, with unceasing wonder, the natives
+stared at reflections of their own persons. In the river there was a
+private dry dock of the Woermanns, and along the wharfs for acres
+was lumber for the Woermanns, boxes of trade goods, puncheons and
+casks for the Woermanns, private cooper shops and private machine
+shops and private banks for the Woermanns. The house flag of the
+Woermanns became as significant as that of a reigning sovereign. One
+felt inclined to salute it.</p>
+
+<p>The success of the German merchant on the East Coast and over all
+the world appears to be a question of character. He is patient,
+methodical, painstaking; it is his habit of industry that is helping
+him to close port after port to English, French, and American goods.
+The German clerks do not go to the East Coast or to China and South
+America to drink absinthe or whiskey, or to play dominoes or
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a>[156]</span>cricket. They work twice as long as do the other white men, and
+during those longer office hours they toil twice as hard. One of our
+passengers was a German agent returning for his vacation. I used to
+work in the smoking-room and he always was at the next table, also
+at work, on his ledgers and account books. He was so industrious
+that he bored me, and one day I asked him why, instead of spoiling
+his vacation with work, he had not balanced his books before he left
+the Coast.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is an error,&quot; he said; &quot;I can not find him.&quot; And he explained
+that in the record of his three years' stewardship, which he was to
+turn over to the directors in Berlin, there was somewhere a mistake
+of a sixpence.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But,&quot; I protested, &quot;what's sixpence to you? You drink champagne all
+day. You begin at nine in the morning!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I drink champagne,&quot; said the clerk, &quot;because for three years I have
+myself alone in the bush lived, but, can I to my directors go with a
+book not balanced?&quot; He laid his hand upon his heart and shook his
+head. &quot;It is my heart that tells me 'No!'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After three weeks he gave a shout, his face <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a>[157]</span>blushed with pleasure,
+and actual tears were in his eyes. He had dug out the error, and at
+once he celebrated the recovery of the single sixpence by giving me
+twenty-four shillings' worth of champagne. It is a true story, and
+illustrates, I think, the training and method of the German mind, of
+the industry of the merchants who are trading over all the seas. As
+a rule the &quot;trade&quot; goods &quot;made in Germany&quot; are &quot;shoddy.&quot; They do not
+compare in quality with those of England or the States; in every
+foreign port you will find that the English linen is the best, that
+the American agricultural implements, American hardware, saws, axes,
+machetes, are superior to those manufactured in any other country.
+But the German, though his goods are poorer, cuts the coat to please
+the customer. He studies the wishes of the man who is to pay. He is
+not the one who says: &quot;Take it, or leave it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The agent of one of the largest English firms on the Ivory Coast,
+one that started by trading in slaves, said to me: &quot;Our largest
+shipment to this coast is gin. This is a French colony, and if the
+French traders and I were patriots instead of merchants we would
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a>[158]</span>buy from our own people, but we buy from the Germans, because trade
+follows no flag. They make a gin out of potatoes colored with rum or
+gin, and label it 'Demerara' and 'Jamaica.' They sell it to us on
+the wharf at Antwerp for ninepence a gallon, and we sell it at nine
+francs per dozen bottles. Germany is taking our trade from us
+because she undersells us, and because her merchants don't wait for
+trade to come to them, but go after it. Before the Woermann boat is
+due their agent here will come to my factory and spy out all I have
+in my compound. 'Why don't you ship those logs with us?' he'll ask.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Can't spare the boys to carry them to the beach,' I'll say.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'I'll furnish the boys,' he'll answer. That's the German way.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Elder-Dempster boats lie three miles out at sea and blow a
+whistle at us. They act as though by carrying our freight they were
+doing us a favor. These German ships, to save you the long pull,
+anchor close to the beach and lend you their own shore boats and
+their own boys to work your cargo. And if you give them a few tons
+to carry, like as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a>[159]</span>not they'll 'dash' you to a case of 'fizz.' And
+meanwhile the English captain is lying outside the bar tooting his
+whistle and wanting to know if you think he's going to run his ship
+aground for a few bags of rotten kernels. And he can't see, and the
+people at home can't see, why the Germans are crowding us off the
+Coast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Just outside of Duala, in the native village of Bell Town, is the
+palace and the harem of the ruler of the tribe that gave its name to
+the country, Mango Bell, King of the Cameroons. His brother, Prince
+William, sells photographs and &quot;souvenirs.&quot; We bought photographs,
+and on the strength of that hinted at a presentation at court.
+Brother William seemed doubtful, so we bought enough postal cards to
+establish us as <i>&eacute;trangers de distinction</i>, and he sent up our
+names. With Pivani, Hatton &amp; Cookson's chief clerk we were escorted
+to the royal presence. The palace is a fantastic, pagoda-like
+building of three stories; and furnished with many mirrors, carved
+oak sideboards, and lamp-shades of colored glass. Mango Bell, King
+of the Cameroons, sounds like a character in a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a>[160]</span>comic opera, but the
+king was an extremely serious, tall, handsome, and self-respecting
+negro. Having been educated in England, he spoke much more correct
+English than any of us. Of the few &quot;Kings I Have Met,&quot; both tame and
+wild, his manners were the most charming. Back of the palace is an
+enormously long building under one roof. Here live his thirty-five
+queens. To them we were not presented.</p>
+
+<a name="img20" id="img20"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-20.jpg" width="500" height="394" alt="The Palace of the King of the Cameroons."
+title="The Palace of the King of the Cameroons." /></div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Palace of the King of the Cameroons. </p>
+
+<p>Prince William asked me if I knew where in America there was a
+street called Fifth Avenue. I suggested New York. He referred to a
+large Bible, and finding, much to his surprise, that my guess was
+correct, commissioned me to buy him, from a firm on that street,
+just such another Bible as the one in his hand. He forgot to give me
+the money to pay for it, but loaned us a half-dozen little princes
+to bear our purchases to the wharf. For this service their royal
+highnesses graciously condescended to receive a small &quot;dash,&quot; and
+with the chief clerk were especially delighted. He, being a
+sleight-of-hand artist, apparently took five-franc pieces out of
+their Sunday clothes and from their kinky hair. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a>[161]</span>When we left they
+were rapidly disrobing to find if any more five-franc pieces were
+concealed about their persons.</p>
+
+<p>The morning after we sailed from Duala we anchored in the river in
+front of Calabar, the capital of Southern Nigeria. Of all the ports
+at which we touched on the Coast, Calabar was the hottest, the best
+looking, and the best administered. It is a model colony, but to
+bring it to the state it now enjoys has cost sums of money entirely
+out of proportion to those the colony has earned. The money has been
+spent in cutting down the jungle, filling in swamps that breed
+mosquitoes and fever, and in laying out gravel walks, water mains,
+and open cement gutters, and in erecting model hospitals, barracks,
+and administrative offices. Even grass has been made to grow, and
+the high bluff upon which are situated the homes of the white
+officials and Government House has been trimmed and cultivated and
+tamed until it looks like an English park. It is a complete
+imitation, even to golf links and tennis courts. But the fight that
+has been made against the jungle has not stopped with golf links. In
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a>[162]</span>1896 the death rate was ten men out of every hundred. That
+corresponds to what in warfare is a decimating fire, upon which an
+officer, without danger of reproof, may withdraw his men. But at
+Calabar the English doctors did not withdraw, and now the death rate
+is as low as three out of every hundred. That Calabar, or any part
+of the West Coast, will ever be made entirely healthy is doubtful.
+Man can cut down a forest and fill in a swamp, but he can not reach
+up, as to a gas jet, and turn off the sun. And at Calabar, even at
+night when the sun has turned itself off, the humidity and the heat
+leave one sweating, tossing, and gasping for air. In Calabar the
+first thing a white man learns is not to take any liberties with the
+sun. When he dresses, eats, drinks, and moves about the sun is as
+constantly on his mind, as it is on the face of the sun-dial. The
+chief ascent to the top of the bluff where the white people live is
+up a steep cement walk about eighty yards long. At the foot of this
+a white man will be met by four hammock-bearers, and you will see
+him get into the hammock and be carried in it the eighty yards.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a>[163]</span>For even that short distance he is taking no chances. But while he
+nurses his vitality and cares for his health he does not use the sun
+as an excuse for laziness or for slipshod work. I have never seen a
+place in the tropics where, in spite of the handicap of damp, fierce
+heat, the officers and civil officials are so keenly and constantly
+employed, where the bright work was so bright, and the whitewash so
+white.</p>
+
+<p>Out at the barracks of the West African Frontier Force, the
+W.A.F.F.'s, the officers, instead of from the shade of the veranda
+watching the non-coms. teach a native the manual, were themselves at
+work, and each was howling orders at the black recruits and smashing
+a gun against his hip and shoulder as smartly as a drill sergeant. I
+found the standard maintained at Calabar the more interesting
+because the men were almost entirely their own audience. If they
+make the place healthy, and attractive-looking, and dress for
+dinner, and shy at cocktails, and insist that their tan shoes shall
+glow like meershaum pipes, it is not because of the refining
+presence of lovely women, but because the men themselves like things
+that way. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a>[164]</span>The men of Calabar have learned that when the sun is at
+110, morals, like material things, disintegrate, and that, though
+the temptation is to go about in bath-room slippers and pajamas, one
+is wiser to bolster up his drenched and drooping spirit with a stiff
+shirt front and a mess jacket. They tell that in a bush station in
+upper Nigeria, one officer got his D.S.O. because with an audience
+of only a white sergeant he persisted in a habit of shaving twice a
+day.</p>
+
+
+<a name="img21" id="img21"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-21.jpg" width="500" height="326" alt="The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell."
+title="The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell. </p>
+
+<p>There are very few women in Calabar. There are three or four who are
+wives of officials, two nurses employed by the government, and the
+Mother Superior and Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph, and, of
+course, all of them are great belles. For the Sisters, especially
+the officers, the government people, the traders, the natives, even
+the rival missionaries, have the most tremendous respect and
+admiration. The sacrifice of the woman who, to be near her husband
+on the Coast, consents to sicken and fade and grow old before her
+time, and of the nurse who, to preserve the health of others, risks
+her own, is very great; but the sacrifice of the Sisters, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a>[165]</span>who have
+renounced all thought of home and husband, and who have exiled
+themselves to this steaming swamp-land, seems the most unselfish. In
+order to support the 150 little black boys and girls who are at
+school at the mission, the Sisters rob themselves of everything
+except the little that will keep them alive. Two, in addition to
+their work at the mission, act as nurses in the English hospital,
+and for that they receive together $600. This forms the sole regular
+income of the five women; for each $120 a year. With anything else
+that is given them in charity, they buy supplies for the little
+converts. They live in a house of sandstone and zinc that holds the
+heat like a flat-iron, they are obliged to wear a uniform that is of
+material and fashion so unsuited to the tropics that Dr. Chichester,
+in charge of the hospital, has written in protest against it to
+Rome, and on many days they fast, not because the Church bids them
+so to do, but because they have no food. And with it all, these five
+gentlewomen are always eager, cheerful, sweet of temper, and a
+living blessing to all who meet them. What now troubles them is that
+they have no room to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a>[166]</span>accommodate the many young heathen who come to
+them to be taught to wear clothes, and to be good little boys and
+girls. This is causing the Sisters great distress. Any one who does
+not believe in that selfish theory, that charity begins at home, but
+who would like to help to spread Christianity in darkest Africa and
+give happiness to five noble women, who are giving their lives for
+others, should send a postal money order to Marie T. Martin, the
+Reverend Mother Superior of the Catholic Mission of Old Calabar,
+Southern Nigeria.</p>
+
+<p>And if you are going to do it, as they say in the advertising pages,
+&quot;Do it now!&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img22" id="img22"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-22.jpg" width="500" height="320" alt="The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+Their Converts at Old Calabar." title= "The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+Their Converts at Old Calabar." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+Their Converts at Old Calabar. </p>
+
+<p>At Calabar there is a royal prisoner, the King of Benin. He is not
+an agreeable king like His Majesty of the Cameroons, but a grossly
+fat, sensual-looking young man, who, a few years ago, when he was at
+war with the English, made &quot;ju ju&quot; against them by sacrificing three
+hundred maidens, his idea being that the ju ju would drive the
+English out of Benin. It was poor ju ju, for it drove the young man
+himself out of Benin, and now he is a king in exile. As far as I
+could see, the social position of the king is insecure, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a>[167]</span>certainly in Calabar he does not move in the first circles. One
+afternoon, when the four or five ladies of Calabar and Mr. Bedwell,
+the Acting Commissioner, and the officers of the W.A.F.F.'s were at
+the clubhouse having ice-drinks, the king at the head of a retinue
+of cabinet officers, high priests, and wives bore down upon the
+club-house with the evident intention of inviting himself to tea.
+Personally, I should like to have met a young man who could murder
+three hundred girls and worry over it so little that he had not lost
+one of his three hundred pounds, but the others were considerably
+annoyed and sent an A.D.C. to tell him to &quot;Move on!&quot; as though he
+were an organ-grinder, or a performing bear.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;These kings,&quot; exclaimed a subaltern of the W.A.F.F.'s, indignantly,
+&quot;are trying to push in everywhere!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When we departed from Calabar, the only thing that reconciled me to
+leaving it and its charming people, was the fact that when the ship
+moved there was a breeze. While at anchor in the river I had found
+that not being able to breathe by day or to sleep by night in time
+is trying, even to the stoutest constitution.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a>[168]</span>One of the married ladies of Calabar, her husband, an officer of
+the W.A.F.F.'s, and the captain of the police sailed on the
+<i>Nigeria</i> &quot;on leave,&quot; and all Calabar came down to do them honor.
+There was the commissioner's gig, and the marine captain's gig, and
+the police captain's gig, and the gig from &quot;Matilda's,&quot; the English
+trading house, and one from the Dutch house and the French house,
+and each gig was manned by black boys in beautiful uniforms and
+fezzes, and each crew fought to tie up to the foot of the
+accommodation ladder. It was as gay as a regatta. On the
+quarter-deck the officers drank champagne, in the captain's cabin
+Hughes treated the traders to beer, in the &quot;square&quot; the non-coms. of
+the W.A.F.F.'s drank ale. The men who were going away on leave tried
+not to look too happy, and those who were going back to the shore
+drank deep and tried not to appear too carelessly gay. A billet on
+the West Coast is regarded by the man who accepts it as a sort of
+sporting proposition, as a game of three innings of nine months
+each, during which he matches his health against the Coast. If he
+lives he wins; if he dies the Coast wins.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a>[169]</span>After Calabar, at each port off which we anchored, at Ponny,
+Focardos, Lagos, Accra, Cape Coast Castle, and Sekonni, it was
+always the same. Always there came over the side the man going
+&quot;Home,&quot; the man who had fought with the Coast and won. He was as
+excited, as jubilant as a prisoner sentenced to death who had
+escaped his executioners. And always the heartiest in their
+congratulations were the men who were left behind, his brother
+officers, or his fellow traders, the men of the Sun Hat Brigade, in
+their unofficial uniforms, in shirtwaists, broad belts from which
+dangled keys and a whistle, beautifully polished tan boots, and with
+a wand-like whip or stick of elephant hide. They swarmed the decks
+and overwhelmed the escaping refugee with good wishes. He had
+cheated their common enemy. By merely keeping alive he had achieved
+a glorious victory. In their eyes he had performed a feat of
+endurance like swimming the English Channel. They crowded to
+congratulate him as people at the pit-mouth congratulate the
+entombed miner, who, after many days of breathing noisome gases,
+drinks the pure air. Even the black boys seem to feel <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a>[170]</span>the triumph
+of the white master, and their paddles never flashed so bravely, and
+their songs never rang so wildly, as when they were racing him away
+from the brooding Coast with its poisonous vapors toward the big
+white ship that meant health and home.</p>
+
+<p>Although most of the ports we saw only from across a mile or two of
+breakers, they always sent us something of interest. Sometimes all
+the male passengers came on board drunk. With the miners of the Gold
+Coast and the &quot;Palm Oil Ruffians&quot; it used to be a matter of
+etiquette not to leave the Coast in any other condition. Not so to
+celebrate your escape seemed ungenerous and ungrateful. At Sekondi
+one of the miners from Ashanti was so completely drunk, that he was
+swung over the side, tied up like a plum-pudding, in a bag.</p>
+
+<p>When he emerged from the bag his expression of polite inquiry was
+one with which all could sympathize. To lose consciousness on the
+veranda of a caf&eacute;, and awake with a bump on the deck of a steamer
+many miles at sea, must strengthen one's belief in magic carpets.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a>[171]</span>Another entertainment for the white passengers was when the boat
+boys fought for the black passengers as they were lowered in the
+mammy-chair. As a rule, in the boats from shore, there were twelve
+boys to paddle and three or four extra men to handle and unhook the
+mammy-chair and the luggage. While the boys with the paddles
+man&oelig;uvred to bring their boat next to the ship's side, the extra
+boys tried to pull their rivals overboard, dragging their hands from
+ropes and gunwales, and beating them with paddles. They did this
+while every second the boat under them was spinning in the air or
+diving ten feet into the hollow of the waves, and trying to smash
+itself and every other boat into driftwood. From the deck the second
+officer would swing a mammy-chair over the side with the idea of
+dropping it into one of these boats. But before the chair could be
+lowered, a rival boat would shove the first one away, and with a
+third boat would be fighting for its place. Meanwhile, high above
+the angry sea, the chair and its cargo of black women would be
+twirling like a weathercock and banging against the ship's side. The
+mammies were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a>[172]</span>too terrified to scream, but the ship's officers
+yelled and swore, the boat's crews shrieked, and the black babies
+howled. Each baby was strapped between the shoulders of the mother.
+A mammy-chair is like one of those two-seated swings in which people
+sit facing one another. If to the shoulders of each person in the
+swing was tied a baby, it is obvious that should the swing bump into
+anything, the baby would get the worst of it. That is what happened
+in the mammy-chair. Every time the chair spun around, the head of a
+baby would come &quot;crack!&quot; against the ship's side. So the babies
+howled, and no one of the ship's passengers, crowded six deep along
+the rail, blamed them. The skull of the Ethiopian may be hard, but
+it is most unfair to be swathed like a mummy so that you can neither
+kick nor strike back, and then have your head battered against a
+five-thousand-ton ship.</p>
+
+<p>How the boys who paddled the shore boats live long enough to learn
+how to handle them is a great puzzle. We were told that the method
+was to take out one green boy with a crew of eleven experts. But how
+did the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a>[173]</span>original eleven become experts? At Accra, where the waves
+are very high and rough, are the best boat boys on the coast. We
+watched the Custom House boat fight her way across the two miles of
+surf to the shore. The fight lasted two hours. It was as thrilling
+as watching a man cross Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. The greater
+part of the two hours the boat stood straight in the air, as though
+it meant to shake the crew into the sea, and the rest of the time it
+ran between walls of water ten feet high and was entirely lost to
+sight. Two things about the paddling on the West Coast make it
+peculiar; the boys sit, not on the thwarts, but on the gunwales, as
+a woman rides a side-saddle, and in many parts of the coast the boys
+use paddles shaped like a fork or a trident. One asks how, sitting
+as they do, they are able to brace themselves, and how with their
+forked paddles they obtained sufficient resistance. A coaster's
+explanation of the split paddle was that the boys did not want any
+more resistance than they could prevent.</p>
+
+<a name="img23" id="img23"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 397px;">
+<img src="images/img-23.jpg" width="397" height="450" alt="The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle." title= "The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle. </p>
+
+<p>There is no more royal manner of progress than when one of these
+boats lifts you over <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a>[174]</span>the waves, with the boys chanting some wild
+chorus, with their bare bodies glistening, their teeth and eyes
+shining, the splendid muscles straining, and the dripping paddles
+flashing like twelve mirrors.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power,
+and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in
+unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a
+sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to the
+newly rich.</p>
+
+<p>I knew I had left the West Coast when, the very night we sailed from
+Sierra Leone, for greater comfort, I reached for a linen bed-spread
+that during four stifling, reeking weeks had lain undisturbed at the
+foot of the berth. During that time I had hated it as a monstrous
+thing; as something as hot and heavy as a red flannel blanket, as a
+buffalo robe. And when, on the following night, I found the
+wind-screen was not in the air port, and that, nevertheless, I still
+was alive, I knew we had passed out of reach of the Equator, and
+that all that followed would be as conventional as the &quot;trippers&quot;
+who <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a>[175]</span>joined us at the Canary Isles; and as familiar as the low, gray
+skies, the green, rain-soaked hills, and the complaining Channel
+gulls that convoyed us into Plymouth Harbor.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a>[176]</span>
+
+<h3>ALONG THE EAST COAST</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Were a man picked up on a flying carpet and dropped without warning
+into Loren&ccedil;o Marquez, he might guess for a day before he could make
+up his mind where he was, or determine to which nation the place
+belonged.</p>
+
+<p>If he argued from the adobe houses with red-tiled roofs and walls of
+cobalt blue, the palms, and the yellow custom-house, he might think
+he was in Santiago; the Indian merchants in velvet and gold
+embroideries seated in deep, dark shops which breathe out dry,
+pungent odors, might take him back to Bombay; the Soudanese and
+Egyptians in long blue night-gowns and freshly ironed fezzes would
+remind him of Cairo; the dwarfish Portuguese soldiers, of Madeira,
+Lisbon, and Madrid, and the black, bare-legged policemen in khaki
+with great numerals on their chests, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a>[177]</span>of Benin, Sierra Leone, or
+Zanzibar. After he had noted these and the German, French, and
+English merchants in white duck, and the Dutch man-of-warsmen, who
+look like ship's stewards, the French marines in coal-scuttle
+helmets, the British Jack-tars in their bare feet, and the native
+Kaffir women, each wrapped in a single, gorgeous shawl with a black
+baby peering from beneath her shoulder-blades, he would decide, by
+using the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, that he was in the
+Midway of the Chicago Fair.</p>
+
+<p>Several hundred years ago Da Gama sailed into Delagoa Bay and
+founded the town of Loren&ccedil;o Marquez, and since that time the
+Portuguese have always felt that it is only due to him and to
+themselves to remain there. They have great pride of race, and they
+like the fact that they possess and govern a colony. So, up to the
+present time, in spite of many temptations to dispose of it, they
+have made the ownership of Delagoa Bay an article of their national
+religion. But their national religion does not require of them to
+improve their property. And to-day it is much as it <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a>[178]</span>was when the
+sails of Da Gama's fleet first stirred its poisonous vapors.</p>
+
+<p>The harbor itself is an excellent one and the bay is twenty-two
+miles along, but there is only one landing-pier, and that such a
+pier as would be considered inconsistent with the dignity of the
+Larchmont Yacht Club. To the town itself Portugal has been content
+to contribute as her share the gatherers of taxes, collectors of
+customs and dispensers of official seals. She is indifferent to the
+fact that the bulk of general merchandise, wine, and machinery that
+enter her port is brought there by foreigners. She only demands that
+they buy her stamps. Her importance in her own colony is that of a
+toll-gate at the entrance of a great city.</p>
+
+<p>Loren&ccedil;o Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home.
+When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen
+a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried
+hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months,
+the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were
+robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a>[179]</span>one of the
+twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and
+unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of
+Loren&ccedil;o Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and
+selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous
+of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its
+patrons that &quot;Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests
+will please lock their doors.&quot; This was one of three hotels owned by
+the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the
+&quot;tough&quot; hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had
+found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat
+difficult.</p>
+
+<p>On her way from Loren&ccedil;o Marquez to Beira our ship, the <i>Kanzlar</i>,
+kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow
+sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of
+outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue
+mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great
+inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern
+coast and against which the waves <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a>[180]</span>break with a report like the
+bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and
+the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills
+accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw
+Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four
+stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the
+summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the
+sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the
+lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were
+more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It
+suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the
+board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her
+Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing
+except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this
+should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the
+Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and
+instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt
+were only opened for the summer season and which for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a>[181]</span>the rest of
+the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial
+gales. Beira need only to have added to her &quot;Sea-View&quot; and &quot;Beach&quot;
+hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type
+artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home.
+Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and
+Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and
+Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many
+ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were
+moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Loren&ccedil;o
+Marquez, was brisk, busy, and clean. Although both are ostensibly
+Portuguese, Beira is to Loren&ccedil;o Marquez what the cleanest street of
+Greenwich Village, of New York City, is to &quot;Hell's Kitchen&quot; and the
+Chinese Quarter. The houses were well swept and cool, the shops were
+alluring, the streets were of clean shifting white sand, and the
+sidewalks, of gray cement, were as well kept as a Philadelphia
+doorstep. The most curious feature of Beira is her private tram-car
+system. These cars run on tiny tracks which rise out of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a>[182]</span>sand
+and extend from one end of the town to the other, with branch lines
+running into the yards of shops and private houses. The motive power
+for these cars is supplied by black boys who run behind and push
+them. Their trucks are about half as large as those on the hand-cars
+we see flying along our railroad tracks at home, worked by gangs of
+Italian laborers. On some of the trucks there is only a bench,
+others are shaded by awnings, and a few have carriage-lamps and
+cushioned seats and carpets. Each of them is a private conveyance;
+there is not one which can be hired by the public. When a merchant
+wishes to go down town to the port, his black boys carry his private
+tram-car from his garden and settle it on the rails, the merchant
+seats himself, and the boys push him and his baby-carriage to
+whatever part of the city he wishes to go. When his wife is out
+shopping and stops at a store the boys lift her car into the sand in
+order to make a clear track for any other car which may be coming
+behind them. One would naturally suppose that with the tracks and
+switch-boards and sidings already laid, the next step <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a>[183]</span>would be to
+place cars upon them for the convenience of the public, but this is
+not the case, and the tracks through the city are jealously reserved
+for the individuals who tax themselves five pounds a year to extend
+them and to keep them in repair. After the sleds on the island of
+Madeira these private street-cars of Beira struck me as being the
+most curious form of conveyance I had ever seen.</p>
+
+<a name="img24" id="img24"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 298px;">
+<img src="images/img-24.jpg" width="298" height="450" alt="Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira."
+title="Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira. </p>
+
+<p>Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of
+feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some
+of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of
+Cape Town and Durban. But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on
+the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company's possessions,
+and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was
+necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build
+a railroad through the swamp and jungle. This road is now in
+operation. It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the
+brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress
+through the marshes, two hundred of the men working <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a>[184]</span>on it died of
+fever. Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the
+Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the
+Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police. How this
+was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied,
+Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of &quot;Judson and the
+Empire.&quot; It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored
+it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat. A
+week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all
+the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had
+made no mention of the fact. The result was that the <i>Kanzlar</i> was
+hung up for twenty-four hours. We tried to comfort ourselves by
+thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which
+had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of
+empire.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Kanzlar</i> could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the
+<i>Adjutant</i>, which belongs to the same line and which was created for
+these shallow waters, came to the <i>Kanzlar</i>, bringing Chinde with
+her. She brought every white <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a>[185]</span>man in the port, and those who could
+not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the <i>Adjutant</i>,
+clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed
+high above us. For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as
+though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that
+brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the
+pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the <i>Adjutant</i>, in white
+duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of
+Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower
+deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as
+Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and
+gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new
+leather cases. From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and
+from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in
+fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian
+coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound
+and unwound long blue strips of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a>[186]</span>cotton about their shoulders, or
+ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading
+required. Among these strange peoples were goats, as delicately
+colored as a meerschaum pipe, and with the horns of our red deer,
+strange white oxen with humps behind the shoulders, those that are
+exhibited in cages at home as &quot;sacred buffalo,&quot; but which here are
+only patient beasts of burden, and gray monkeys, wildcats, snakes
+and crocodiles in cages addressed to &quot;Hagenbeck, Hamburg.&quot; The
+freight was no less curious; assegais in bundles, horns stretching
+for three feet from point to point, or rising straight, like
+poignards; skins, ground-nuts, rubber, and heavy blocks of bees-wax
+wrapped in coarse brown sacking, and which in time will burn before
+the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Italy, Spain, and France.</p>
+
+<p>People of the &quot;Bromide&quot; class who run across a friend from their own
+city in Paris will say, &quot;Well, to think of meeting <i>you</i> here. How
+small the world is after all!&quot; If they wish a better proof of how
+really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the
+existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a>[187]</span>twenty stores in
+Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not
+the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man
+who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the
+latitudes together and made the world the small department store it
+is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.</p>
+
+<p>The explorer tells you, &quot;I was the first man to climb Kilamajaro.&quot;
+&quot;I was the first to cut a path from the shores of Lake Nyassa into
+the Congo Basin.&quot; He even lectures about it, in front of a wet sheet
+in the light of a stereopticon, and because he has added some miles
+of territory to the known world, people buy his books and learned
+societies place initials after his distinguished name. But before
+his grandfather was born and long before he ever disturbed the
+waters of Nyassa the Ph&oelig;nicians and Arabs and Portuguese and men
+of his own time and race had been there before him to buy ivory,
+both white and black, to exchange beads and brass bars and
+shaving-mirrors for the tusks of elephants, raw gold, copra, rubber,
+and the feathers of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a>[188]</span>the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a
+study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its
+way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in
+consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts
+which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But
+that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear
+at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders,
+backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast
+of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships
+faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire
+Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre
+Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being
+planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want
+tires for their automobiles; and because the fashionable ornament of
+the natives of Swaziland is, for no reason, no longer blue-glass
+beads, manufacturers of beads in Switzerland and Italy find
+themselves out of pocket by some thousands and thousands of pounds.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a>[189]</span>The traders who were making the world smaller by bringing cotton
+prints to Chinde to cover her black nakedness, her British Majesty's
+consul at that port, and the boy lieutenant of the paddle-wheeled
+gunboat which patrols the Zambesi River, were the gentlemen who
+informed me that they were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom
+the <i>Kanzlar</i> might have picked up from a desert island, where they
+had been marooned and left to rot. They observed the gilded glory of
+the <i>Kanzlar</i> smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables,
+with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all
+the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus.
+The boy-commander of the gunboat gazed at white women in the saloon
+with fascinated admiration.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have never,&quot; he declared, breathlessly, &quot;I have never seen so
+many beautiful women in one place at the same time! I'd forgotten
+that there were so many white people in the world.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If I stay on board this ship another min<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a>[190]</span>ute I shall go home,&quot; said
+Her Majesty's consul, firmly. &quot;You will have to hold me. It's coming
+over me&mdash;I feel it coming. I shall never have the strength to go
+back.&quot; He appealed to the sympathetic lieutenant. &quot;Let's desert
+together,&quot; he begged.</p>
+
+<a name="img25" id="img25"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 385px;">
+<img src="images/img-25.jpg" width="385" height="450" alt="One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+Mozambique." title="One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+Mozambique." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+Mozambique. </p>
+
+<p>In the swamps of the East Coast the white exiles lay aside the
+cloaks and masks of crowded cities. They do not try to conceal their
+feelings, their vices, or their longings. They talk to the first
+white stranger they meet of things which in the great cities a man
+conceals even from his room-mate, and men they would not care to
+know, and whom they would never meet in the fixed social pathways of
+civilization, they take to their hearts as friends. They are too few
+to be particular, they have no choice, and they ask no questions. It
+is enough that the white man, like themselves, is condemned to
+exile. They do not try to find solace in the thought that they are
+the &quot;foretrekkers&quot; of civilization, or take credit to themselves
+because they are the path-finders and the pioneers who bear the heat
+and burden of the day. They are sorry for themselves, because they
+know, more keenly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a>[191]</span>than any outsider can know, how good is the life
+they have given up, and how hard is the one they follow, but they do
+not ask anyone else to be sorry. They would be very much surprised
+if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and
+Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good
+and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>On the day they boarded the <i>Kanzlar</i> the pains of nostalgia were
+sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves
+of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own
+condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck,
+as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even
+boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess,
+who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.</p>
+
+<p>A little English boy ran through the smoking-room, and they fell
+upon him, and quarrelled for the privilege of holding him on their
+knees. He was a shy, coquettish little English boy, and the
+boisterous, noisy men did not appeal to him. To them he meant home
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a>[192]</span>and family and the old nursery, papered with colored pictures from
+the Christmas <i>Graphic</i>. His stout, bare legs and tangled curls and
+sailor's hat, with &quot;H.M.S. Mars&quot; across it, meant all that was clean
+and sweet-smelling in their past lives.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll arrest you for a deserter,&quot; said the lieutenant of the
+gunboat. &quot;I'll make the consul send you back to the <i>Mars</i>.&quot; He held
+the boy on his knee fearfully, handling him as though he were some
+delicate and precious treasure that might break if he dropped it.</p>
+
+<p>The agent of the Oceanic Development Company, Limited, whose
+business in life is to drive savage Angonis out of the jungle, where
+he hopes in time to see the busy haunts of trade, begged for the boy
+with eloquent pleading.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You've had the kiddie long enough now,&quot; he urged. &quot;Let me have him.
+Come here, Mr. Mars, and sit beside me, and I'll give you fizzy
+water&mdash;like lemon-squash, only nicer.&quot; He held out a wet bottle of
+champagne alluringly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, he is coming to his consul,&quot; that youth declared. &quot;He's coming
+to his consul <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a>[193]</span>for protection. You are not fit characters to
+associate with an innocent child. Come to me, little boy, and do not
+listen to those degraded persons.&quot; So the &quot;innocent child&quot; seated
+himself between the consul and the chartered trader, and they patted
+his fat calves and red curls and took his minute hands in their
+tanned fists, eying him hungrily, like two cannibals. But the little
+boy was quite unconscious and inconsiderate of their hunger, and,
+with the cruelty of children, pulled himself free and ran away.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was such a nice little kiddie,&quot; they said, apologetically, as
+though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years,&quot;
+said the lieutenant, genially. &quot;But fancy your knowing Sparks! He
+has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and
+he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the
+lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's
+where we hit it off&mdash;we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I
+suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down
+here. I know <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a>[194]</span>Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to
+talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks
+has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred
+miles.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely
+that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and
+spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the
+second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized
+a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were
+sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving
+themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a &quot;disgusting
+practice,&quot; and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the
+lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; he said; &quot;and what's worse is that we're here for two years
+more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China.
+Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old,
+and the steamer stops once every month.&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img26" id="img26"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-26.jpg" width="500" height="366" alt="Custom House, Zanzibar."
+title="Custom House, Zanzibar." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Custom House, Zanzibar. </p>
+
+<p>Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side,
+so we had time in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a>[195]</span>which to give the exiles the news of the outside
+world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one
+as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy;
+how another had sold &quot;ready to wear&quot; clothes in a New York
+department store, and another had been attach&eacute; at Madrid, and
+another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We
+exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would
+meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many
+bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect
+the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.</p>
+
+<p>But at last the ship's whistle blew with raucous persistence. It was
+final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which
+once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages,
+of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and
+flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the
+mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the
+<i>Kanzlar</i> became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon
+line.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a>[196]</span>I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them
+until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to
+borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with
+never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean
+land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty
+group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was
+more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall
+never meet them again&mdash;we had just burned signals as our ships
+passed in the night&mdash;and yet, I must always consider among the
+friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways
+straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi,
+&quot;the only respectable members of Chinde Society.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1"> *</a></p>
+
+<p class="foot"><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1">*</a>
+N<small>OTE</small>&mdash;I did not lose the white-clad youths. The
+lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a
+consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde
+newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also,
+should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.
+He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the
+<i>Kanzlar</i>, alone prevented his social position being publicly
+recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though
+tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society.&nbsp;&nbsp; R.H.D.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a>[197]</span>The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his
+contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one
+which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its
+inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown
+jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the
+captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down
+with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the
+slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the
+casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the
+sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the
+shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the
+harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by
+the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of
+the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom
+this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of
+honor.</p>
+
+<a name="img27" id="img27"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-27.jpg" width="500" height="363" alt="Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar."
+title="Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar. </p>
+
+<p>Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great
+slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a>[198]</span>fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a
+fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison
+and all the inhabitants as well. To-day the slave-trade brings to
+those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but
+the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain,
+and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and
+red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been
+so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has
+taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The
+streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their
+silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day,
+which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no
+footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs.
+The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares
+to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no
+carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and
+refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the
+city, and with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a>[199]</span>the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only
+wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.</p>
+
+<p>I have never visited a city which so impressed one with the fact
+that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred
+years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is,
+on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with
+dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving
+above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city
+of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as
+letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and
+the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy
+curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers
+of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along
+the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great
+blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated
+checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are
+palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and
+churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard
+the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a>[200]</span>or leave the
+churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty
+stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the
+actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the
+fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous
+period, when the Portuguese governors, the &quot;gentlemen adventurers,&quot;
+and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within
+its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery,
+when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and
+the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the
+market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of
+bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves
+bought and sold.</p>
+
+<p>In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of
+East Africa from south of Loren&ccedil;o Marquez to north of Mozambique,
+and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog
+in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to
+help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he
+keeps those who would improve both from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a>[201]</span>gaining any hold or
+influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East
+Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now
+surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack
+of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the
+country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side.
+They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely
+lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats
+they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new
+territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars
+them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth
+undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his caf&eacute; at the coast
+and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the
+native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and
+the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to
+cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them
+no protection.</p>
+
+<p>The land back of Mozambique is divided into &quot;holdings,&quot; and the rent
+of each holding is based upon the number of native huts it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a>[202]</span>contains. The tax per hut is one pound a year, and these holdings
+are leased to any Portuguese who promises to pay the combined taxes
+of all the huts. He also engages to cut new roads, to keep those
+already made in repair, and to furnish a sufficient number of police
+to maintain order. The lessees of these holdings have given rise to
+many and terrible scandals. In the majority of cases, the lessee,
+once out of reach of all authority and of public opinion, and
+wielding the power of life and death, becomes a tyrant and
+task-master over his district, taxing the natives to five and ten
+times the amount which each is supposed to furnish, and treating
+them virtually as his bondsmen. Up along the Shire River, the
+lessees punish the blacks by hanging them from a tree by their
+ankles and beating their bare backs with rhinoceros hide, until, as
+it has been described to me by a reputable English resident, the
+blood runs in a stream over the negro's shoulders, and forms a pool
+beneath his eyes.</p>
+
+<a name="img28" id="img28"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-28.jpg" width="500" height="329" alt="The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking, Is
+Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A."
+title="The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking, Is
+Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking, Is
+Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A. </p>
+
+<p>You hear of no legitimate enterprise fostered by these lessees, of
+no development of natural resources, but, instead, you are told
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a>[203]</span>tales of sickening cruelty, and you can read in the consular
+reports others quite as true; records of heartless treatment of
+natives, of neglect of great resources, and of hurried snatching at
+the year's crop and a return to the Coast, with nothing to show of
+sustained effort or steady development. The incompetence of Portugal
+cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the
+Boer, she will find the seaport of Loren&ccedil;o Marquez too necessary to
+her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the
+Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the
+Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African
+Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to
+make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It
+seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little
+kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to
+benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she will
+withdraw from it, in favor of those who are fitter to survive her.</p>
+
+<p>There is no more interesting contrast along <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a>[204]</span>the coast of East
+Africa than that presented by the colonies of England, Germany, and
+Portugal. Of these three, the colonies of the Englishmen are, as one
+expects to find them, the healthiest, the busiest, and the most
+prosperous. They thrive under your very eyes; you feel that they
+were established where they are, not by accident, not to gratify a
+national vanity or a ruler's ambition, but with foresight and with
+knowledge, and with the determination to make money; and that they
+will increase and flourish because they are situated where the
+natives and settlers have something to sell, and where the men can
+bring, in return, something the natives and colonials wish to buy.
+Port Elizabeth, Durban, East London, and Zanzibar belong to this
+prosperous class, which gives good reason for the faith of those who
+founded them.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, as opposed to these, there are the settlements of
+the Portuguese, rotten and corrupt, and the German settlements of
+Dar Es Salaam and Tanga which have still to prove their right to
+exist. Outwardly, to the eye, they are model settlements. Dar Es
+Salaam, in particular, is a beautiful <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a>[205]</span>and perfectly appointed
+colonial town. In the care in which it is laid out, in the
+excellence of its sanitary arrangements, in its cleanliness, and in
+the magnificence of its innumerable official residences, and in
+their sensible adaptability to the needs of the climate, one might
+be deceived into believing that Dar Es Salaam is the beautiful
+gateway of a thriving and busy colony. But there are no ramparts of
+merchandise along her wharves, no bulwarks of strangely scented
+bales blocking her water-front; no lighters push hurriedly from the
+shore to meet the ship, although she is a German ship, or to receive
+her cargo of articles &quot;made in Germany.&quot; On the contrary, her
+freight is unloaded at the English ports, and taken on at English
+ports. And the German traders who send their merchandise to Hamburg
+in her hold come over the side at Zanzibar, at Durban, and at Aden,
+where the English merchants find in them fierce competitors. There
+is nothing which goes so far to prove the falsity of the saying that
+&quot;trade follows the flag&quot; as do these model German colonies with
+their barracks, governor's palace, officers' clubs, public <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a>[206]</span>pleasure
+parks, and with no trade; and the English colonies, where the German
+merchants remain, and where, under the English flag, they grow
+steadily rich. The German Emperor, believing that colonies are a
+source of strength to an empire, rather than the weakness that they
+are, has raised the German flag in Central East Africa, but the
+ships of the German East African Company, subsidized by him, carry
+their merchandize to the English ports, and his German subjects
+remain where they can make the most money. They do not move to those
+ports where the flag of their country would wave over them.</p>
+
+<p>Dar Es Salaam, although it lacks the one thing needful to make it a
+model settlement, possesses all the other things which are needful,
+and many which are pure luxuries. Its residences, as I have said,
+have been built after the most approved scientific principles of
+ventilation and sanitation. In no tropical country have I seen
+buildings so admirably adapted to the heat and climatic changes and
+at the same time more in keeping with the surrounding scenery. They
+are handsome, cool-looking, white and clean, with broad <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a>[207]</span>verandas,
+high walls, and false roofs under which currents of air are lured in
+spite of themselves. The residences are set back along the high bank
+which faces the bay. In front of them is a public promenade, newly
+planted shade-trees arch over it, and royal palms reach up to it
+from the very waters of the harbor. At one end of this semicircle
+are the barracks of the Soudanese soldiers, and at the other is the
+official palace of the governor. Everything in the settlement is
+new, and everything is built on the scale of a city, and with the
+idea of accommodating a great number of people. Hotels and caf&eacute;s,
+better than any one finds in the older settlements along the coast,
+are arranged on the water-front, and there is a church capable of
+seating the entire white population at one time. If the place is to
+grow, it can do so only through trade, and when trade really comes
+all these palaces and caf&eacute;s and barracks which occupy the entire
+water-front will have to be pushed back to make way for warehouses
+and custom-house sheds. At present it is populated only by
+officials, and, I believe, twelve white women.</p>
+
+<a name="img29" id="img29"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-29.jpg" width="500" height="349" alt="The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage."
+title="The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage. </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a>[208]</span>You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a
+box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this
+beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and
+emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at
+a world's fair as an example of a model village.</p>
+
+<p>In writing of Zanzibar I am embarrassed by the knowledge that I am
+not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first
+sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage
+out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me
+made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.</p>
+
+<p>Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of
+high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand
+at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the
+people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run
+ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass
+of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty
+fortress-like fa&ccedil;ade before you, and a strip of white sand is at
+your feet.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a>[209]</span>And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind
+resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack
+in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls
+where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak,
+and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.</p>
+
+<p>In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous,
+unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework,
+windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of
+the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue,
+and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and
+the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East
+African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering
+walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either
+actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and
+glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him;
+the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their
+children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a>[210]</span>bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you
+with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare
+shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows
+dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long
+and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of
+richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces
+of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts,
+and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of
+the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it
+is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.</p>
+
+<p>The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think
+Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in
+your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a
+vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of
+Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it
+healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection
+for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm
+government under a benign <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a>[211]</span>and gentle Sultan, they have done all of
+this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb
+of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous
+life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but
+they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at
+all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does
+in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in
+Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers
+alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so
+infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for
+those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly
+for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.</p>
+
+<a name="img30" id="img30"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 330px;">
+<img src="images/img-30.jpg" width="330" height="450" alt="H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan of
+Zanzibar." title="H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan of
+Zanzibar." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan of
+Zanzibar. </p>
+
+<p>Zanzibar is an &quot;Arabian Nights&quot; city, a comic-opera capital, a most
+difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any
+house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and
+decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel
+sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe
+walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a>[212]</span>carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing
+will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that
+the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the
+next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will
+prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.</p>
+
+<p>Several hundred years ago the Sultans of Zanzibar grew powerful and
+wealthy through exporting slaves and ivory from the mainland. These
+were not two separate industries, but one was developed by the other
+and was dependent upon it. The procedure was brutally simple. A
+slave-trader, having first paid his tribute to the Sultan, crossed
+to the mainland, and marching into the interior made his bargain
+with one of the local chiefs for so much ivory, and for so many men
+to carry it down to the coast. Without some such means of transport
+there could have been no bargain, so the chief who was anxious to
+sell would select a village which had not paid him the taxes due
+him, and bid the trader help himself to what men he found there.
+Then would follow a hideous night attack, a massacre of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a>[213]</span>women and
+children, and the taking prisoners of all able-bodied males. These
+men, chained together in long lines, and each bearing a heavy tooth
+of ivory upon his shoulder, would be whipped down to the coast. It
+was only when they had carried the ivory there, and their work was
+finished, that the idea presented itself of selling them as well as
+the ivory. Later, these bearers became of equal value with the
+ivory, and the raiding of native villages and the capture of men and
+women to be sold into slavery developed into a great industry. The
+industry continues fitfully to-day, but it is carried on under great
+difficulties, and at a risk of heavy punishments. What is called
+&quot;domestic slavery&quot; is recognized on the island of Zanzibar, the vast
+clove plantations which lie back of the port employing many hundreds
+of these domestic slaves. It is not to free these from their slight
+bondage that the efforts of those who are trying to suppress the
+slave-trade is to-day directed, but to prevent others from being
+added to their number. What slave-trading there is at present is by
+Arabs and Indians. They convey the slaves in dhows from the mainland
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a>[214]</span>to Madagascar, Arabia, or southern Persia, and to the Island of
+Pemba, which lies north of Zanzibar, and only fifteen miles from the
+mainland. If a slave can be brought this short distance in safety he
+can be sold for five hundred dollars; on the mainland he is not
+worth more than fifteen dollars. The channels, and the mouths of
+rivers, and the little bays opening from the Island of Pemba are
+patrolled more or less regularly by British gunboats, and junior
+officers in charge of a cutter and a crew of half a dozen men, are
+detached from these for a few months at a time on &quot;boat service.&quot; It
+seems to be an unprofitable pursuit, for one officer told me that
+during his month of boat service he had boarded and searched three
+hundred dhows, which is an average of ten a day, and found slaves on
+only one of them. But as, on this occasion, he rescued four slaves,
+and the slavers, moreover, showed fight, and wounded him and two of
+his boat's crew, he was more than satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>The trade in ivory, which has none of these restrictions upon it,
+still flourishes, and the cool, dark warerooms of Zanzibar are
+stored <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a>[215]</span>high with it. In a corner of one little cellar they showed
+us twenty-five thousand dollars worth of these tusks piled up as
+carelessly as though they were logs in a wood-shed. One of the most
+curious sights in Zanzibar is a line of Zanzibari boys, each
+balancing a great tusk on his shoulder, worth from five hundred to
+two thousand dollars, and which is unprotected except for a piece of
+coarse sacking.</p>
+
+<a name="img31" id="img31"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-31.jpg" width="500" height="327" alt="A German &quot;Factory&quot; at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+Living Apartments Above." title="A German &quot;Factory&quot; at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+Living Apartments Above." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">A German &quot;Factory&quot; at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+Living Apartments Above. </p>
+
+<p>The largest exporters of ivory in the world are at Zanzibar, and
+though probably few people know it, the firm which carries on this
+business belongs to New York City, and has been in the ivory trade
+with India and Africa from as far back as the fifties. In their
+house at Zanzibar they have entertained every distinguished African
+explorer, and the stories its walls have heard of native wars,
+pirate dhows, slave-dealers, the English occupation, and terrible
+marches through the jungles of the Congo, would make valuable and
+picturesque history. The firm has always held a semi-official
+position, for the reason that the United States Consul at Zanzibar,
+who should speak at least Swahili and Portuguese, is invariably
+chosen for the post from a drug-store <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a>[216]</span>in Yankton, Dakota, or a
+post-office in Canton, Ohio. Consequently, on arriving at Zanzibar
+he becomes homesick, and his first official act is to cable his
+resignation, and the State Department instructs whoever happens to
+be general manager of the ivory house to perform the duties of
+acting-consul. So, the ivory house has nearly always held the eagle
+of the consulate over its doorway. The manager of the ivory house,
+who at the time of our visit was also consul, is Harris Robbins
+Childs. Mr. Childs is well known in New York City, is a member of
+many clubs there, and speaks at least five languages. He understands
+the native tongue of Zanzibar so well that when the Prime Minister
+of the Sultan took us to the palace to pay our respects, Childs
+talked the language so much better than did the Sultan's own Prime
+Minister that there was in consequence much joking and laughing. The
+Sultan then was a most dignified, intelligent, and charming old
+gentleman. He was popular both with his own people, who loved him
+with a religious fervor, and with the English, who unobtrusively
+conducted his affairs.</p>
+
+<p>There have been sultans who have acted <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a>[217]</span>less wisely than does Hamud
+bin Muhamad bin Said. A few years ago one of these, Said Khaled,
+defied the British Empire as represented by several gunboats, and
+dared them to fire on his ship of war, a tramp steamer which he had
+converted into a royal yacht. The gunboats were anchored about two
+hundred yards from the palace, which stands at the water's edge, and
+at the time agreed upon, they sank the Sultan's ship of war in the
+short space of three minutes, and in a brief bombardment destroyed
+the greater part of his palace. The ship of war still rests where
+she sank, and her topmasts peer above the water only three hundred
+yards distant from the windows of the new palace. They serve as a
+constant warning to all future sultans.</p>
+
+<p>The new palace is of somewhat too modern architecture, and is not
+nearly as dignified as are the massive white walls of the native
+houses which surround it. But within it is a fairy palace, hung with
+silk draperies, tapestries, and hand-painted curtains; the floors
+are covered with magnificent rugs from Persia and India, and the
+reception-room is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a>[218]</span>crowded with treasures of ebony, ivory, lacquer
+work, and gold and silver. There were two thrones made of silver
+dragons, with many scales, and studded with jewels. The Sultan did
+not seem to mind our openly admiring his treasures, and his
+attendants, who stood about him in gorgeous-colored silks heavy with
+gold embroideries, were evidently pleased with the deep impression
+they made upon the visitors. The Sultan was very gentle and
+courteous and human, especially in the pleasure he took over his son
+and heir, who then was at school in England, and who, on the death
+of his father, succeeded him. He seemed very much gratified when we
+suggested that there was no better training-place for a boy than an
+English public school; as Americans, he thought our opinion must be
+unprejudiced. Before he sent us away, he gave Childs, and each of
+us, a photograph of himself, one of which is reproduced in this
+book.</p>
+
+<p>Our next port was the German settlement of Tanga. We arrived there
+just as a blood-red sun was setting behind great and gloomy
+mountains. The place itself was bathed in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a>[219]</span>damp hot vapors, and
+surrounded even to the water's edge by a steaming jungle. It was
+more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we
+had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a
+trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the
+evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp
+three lions had kept him awake until morning.</p>
+
+<a name="img32" id="img32"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-32.jpg" width="500" height="323" alt="Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+Tanga." title="Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+Tanga." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+Tanga. </p>
+
+<p>The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports. We saw them
+only through field-glasses from the ship's side, so that there is,
+in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of
+Africa. But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the
+Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has passed
+away. It was certainly worth taking once. If I have failed to make
+that apparent, the fault lies with the writer. It is certainly not
+the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that
+&quot;sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue,&quot; or of the
+exiles and &quot;remittance men,&quot; or of the engineers who are building
+the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest
+which the East Coast <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a>[220]</span>presents in its problem of trade, of conquest,
+and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14297 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14297 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14297)
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+Project Gutenberg's The Congo and Coasts of Africa, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Congo and Coasts of Africa
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: December 8, 2004 [EBook #14297]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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°, 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 cafés 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 preëmpted. 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.
+
+Sierra Leone, as originally purchased in 1786, consisted of twenty
+square miles, for which among other articles of equal value King
+Naimbanna received a "crimson satin embroidered waistcoat, one
+puncheon of rum, ten pounds of beads, two cheeses, one box of
+smoking pipes, a mock diamond ring, and a tierce of pork."
+
+What first impressed me about Sierra Leone was the heat. It does not
+permit one to give his attention wholly to anything else. I always
+have maintained that the hottest place on earth is New York, and I
+have been in other places with more than a local reputation for
+heat; some along the Equator, Lourenço Marquez, which is only
+prevented from being an earthen oven because it is a swamp; the Red
+Sea, with a following breeze, and from both shores the baked heat of
+the desert, and Nagasaki, on a rainy day in midsummer.
+
+But New York in August radiating stored-up heat from iron-framed
+buildings, with the foul, dead air shut in by the skyscrapers, with
+a humidity that makes you think you are breathing through a
+steam-heated sponge, is as near the lower regions as I hope any of
+us will go. And yet Sierra Leone is no mean competitor.
+
+We climbed the moss-covered steps to the quay to face a great white
+building that blazed like the base of a whitewashed stove at white
+heat. Before it were some rusty cannon and a canoe cut out of a
+single tree, and, seated upon it selling fruit and sun-dried fish,
+some native women, naked to the waist, their bodies streaming with
+palm oil and sweat. At the same moment something struck me a blow on
+the top of the head, at the base of the spine and between the
+shoulder blades, and the ebony ladies and the white "factory" were
+burnt up in a scroll of flame.
+
+ [Illustration: A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+ Whitewashed Stove at White Heat.]
+
+I heard myself in a far-away voice asking where one could buy a sun
+helmet and a white umbrella, and until I was under their protection,
+Sierra Leone interested me no more.
+
+One sees more different kinds of black people in Sierra Leone than
+in any other port along the Coast; Senegalese and Senegambians,
+Kroo boys, Liberians, naked bush boys bearing great burdens from the
+forests, domestic slaves in fez and colored linen livery, carrying
+hammocks swung from under a canopy, the local electric hansom,
+soldiers of the W.A.F.F., the West African Frontier Force, in Zouave
+uniform of scarlet and khaki, with bare legs; Arabs from as far in
+the interior as Timbuctu, yellow in face and in long silken robes;
+big fat "mammies" in well-washed linen like the washerwomen of
+Jamaica, each balancing on her head her tightly rolled umbrella, and
+in the gardens slim young girls, with only a strip of blue and white
+linen from the waist to the knees, lithe, erect, with glistening
+teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission
+schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms.
+Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the
+tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public
+schools operated by the government as well as many others run by
+American and English missions, a club where the white "mammies," as
+all women are called, and the white officers--for Sierra Leone is a
+coaling station on the Cape route to India, and is garrisoned
+accordingly--play croquet, and bowl into a net.
+
+When the officers are not bowling they are tramping into the
+hinterland after tribes on the warpath from Liberia, and coming
+back, perhaps wounded or racked with fever, or perhaps they do not
+come back. On the day we landed they had just buried one of the
+officers. On Saturday afternoon he had been playing tennis, during
+the night the fever claimed him, and Sunday night he was dead.
+
+That night as we pulled out to the steamer there came toward us in
+black silhouette against the sun, setting blood-red into the lagoon,
+two great canoes. They were coming from up the river piled high with
+fruit and bark, with the women and children lying huddled in the
+high bow and stern, while amidships the twelve men at the oars
+strained and struggled until we saw every muscle rise under the
+black skin.
+
+As their stroke slackened, the man in the bow with the tom-tom beat
+more savagely upon it, and shouted to them in shrill sharp cries.
+Their eyes shone, their teeth clenched, the sweat streamed from
+their naked bodies. They might have been slaves chained to the
+thwarts of a trireme.
+
+Just ahead of them lay at anchor the only other ship beside our own
+in port, a two-masted schooner, the _Gladys E. Wilden_, out of
+Boston. Her captain leaned upon the rail smoking his cigar, his
+shirt-sleeves held up with pink elastics, on the back of his head a
+derby hat. As the rowers passed under his bows he looked critically
+at the streaming black bodies and spat meditatively into the water.
+His own father could have had them between decks as cargo. Now for
+the petroleum and lumber he brings from Massachusetts to Sierra
+Leone he returns in ballast.
+
+Because her lines were so home-like and her captain came from Cape
+Cod, we wanted to call on the _Gladys E. Wilden_, but our own
+captain had different views, and the two ships passed in the night,
+and the man from Boston never will know that two folks from home
+were burning signals to him.
+
+Because our next port of call, Grand Bassam, is the chief port of
+the French Ivory Coast, which is 125,000 square miles in extent, we
+expected quite a flourishing seaport. Instead, Grand Bassam was a
+bank of yellow sand, a dozen bungalows in a line, a few wind-blown
+cocoanut palms, an iron pier, and a French flag. Beyond the cocoanut
+palms we could see a great lagoon, and each minute a wave leaped
+roaring upon the yellow sand-bank and tried to hurl itself across
+it, eating up the bungalows on its way, into the quiet waters of the
+lake. Each time we were sure it would succeed, but the yellow bank
+stood like rock, and, beaten back, the wave would rise in white
+spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the
+sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet
+of the bungalows.
+
+We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who
+had come out to join her husband. His factory is a two days' launch
+ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not
+speak English. Her husband had wished her, for her health's sake, to
+stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and
+against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had
+at once set out to join him. She was a very pretty, sad, unsmiling
+young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband's partner
+questions about the new home. His answers, while they did not seem
+to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained
+safely in her London suburb.
+
+Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron
+pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her.
+
+The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and
+shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes
+staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow,
+another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the
+partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in
+white under the bridge.
+
+The husband and the young wife were swung together over the side to
+the lifting waves in a two-seated "mammy chair," like one of those
+_vis-à-vis_ swings you see in public playgrounds and picnic groves,
+and they carried with them, as a gift from Captain Burton, a fast
+melting lump of ice, the last piece of fresh meat they will taste in
+many a day, and the blessings of all the ship's company. And then,
+with inhospitable haste there was a rattle of anchor chains, a quick
+jangle of bells from the bridge to the engine-room, and the
+_Bruxellesville_ swept out to sea, leaving the girl from the London
+suburb to find her way into the heart of Africa. Next morning we
+anchored in a dripping fog off Sekondi on the Gold Coast, to allow
+an English doctor to find his way to a fever camp. For nine years he
+had been a Coaster, and he had just gone home to fit himself, by a
+winter's vacation in London, for more work along the Gold Coast. It
+is said of him that he has "never lost a life." On arriving in
+London he received a cable telling him three doctors had died, the
+miners along the railroad to Ashanti were rotten with fever, and
+that he was needed.
+
+ [Illustration: The "Mammy Chair" is Like Those Swings You See in
+ Public Playgrounds.]
+
+So he and his wife, as cheery and bright as though she were setting
+forth on her honeymoon, were going back to take up the white man's
+burden. We swung them over the side as we had the other two, and
+that night in the smoking-room the Coasters drank "Luck to him,"
+which, in the vernacular of this unhealthy shore, means "Life to
+him," and to the plucky, jolly woman who was going back to fight
+death with the man who had never lost a life.
+
+As the ship was getting under way, a young man in "whites" and a sun
+helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by
+which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled
+recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his
+helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt;
+that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for
+he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding
+as though we had been old acquaintances.
+
+"You going far?" he asked. He spoke in the soft, detached voice of
+the public-school Englishman.
+
+"To the Congo," I answered.
+
+He stood swaying with the ship, looking as though there were
+something he wished to say, and then laughed, and added gravely,
+giving me the greeting of the Coast: "Luck to you."
+
+"Luck to YOU," I said.
+
+That is the worst of these gaddings about, these meetings with men
+you wish you could know, who pass like a face in the crowded street,
+who hold out a hand, or give the password of the brotherhood, and
+then drop down the sea ladder and out of your life forever.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
+
+
+To me, the fact of greatest interest about the Congo is that it is
+owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned by
+one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not
+trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that
+in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it.
+Though backed by all the mailed fists in the German Empire, and all
+the _Dreadnoughts_ of the seas, no other modern monarch would make
+such a claim. It does not sound like anything we have heard since
+the days and the ways of Pharaoh. And the most remarkable feature of
+it is, that the man who makes this claim is the man who was placed
+over the Congo as a guardian, to keep it open to the trade of the
+world, to suppress slavery. That, in the Congo, he has killed trade
+and made the products of the land his own, that of the natives he
+did not kill he has made slaves, is what to-day gives the Congo its
+chief interest. It is well to emphasize how this one man stole a
+march on fourteen Powers, including the United States, and stole
+also an empire of one million square miles.
+
+Twenty-five years ago all of Africa was divided into many parts. The
+part which still remained to be distributed among the Powers was
+that which was watered by the Congo River and its tributaries.
+
+Along the north bank of the Congo River ran the French Congo; the
+Portuguese owned the lands to the south, and on the east it was shut
+in by protectorates and colonies of Germany and England. It was, and
+is, a territory as large, were Spain and Russia omitted, as Europe.
+Were a map of the Congo laid upon a map of Europe, with the mouth of
+the Congo River where France and Spain meet at Biarritz, the
+boundaries of the Congo would reach south to the heel of Italy, to
+Greece, to Smyrna; east to Constantinople and Odessa; northeast to
+St. Petersburg and Finland, and northwest to the extreme limits of
+Scotland. Distances in this country are so enormous, the means of
+progress so primitive, that many of the Belgian officers with whom I
+came south and who already had travelled nineteen days from Antwerp,
+had still, before they reached their posts, to steam, paddle, and
+walk for three months.
+
+In 1844 to dispose amicably of this great territory, which was much
+desired by several of the Powers, a conference was held at Berlin.
+There it was decided to make of the Congo Basin an Independent
+State, a "free-for-all" country, where every flag could trade with
+equal right, and with no special tariff or restriction.
+
+The General Act of this conference agreed: "The trade of ALL nations
+shall enjoy complete freedom." "No Power which exercises or shall
+exercise Sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions shall be
+allowed to _grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters
+of trade_." "ALL the Powers exercising Sovereign rights or influence
+in the afore-said territories bind themselves to watch over the
+preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement
+of _the condition of their moral and material welfare_, and _to
+help in suppressing slavery_." The italics are mine. These
+quotations from the act are still binding upon the fourteen Powers,
+including the United States.
+
+For several years previous to the Conference of Berlin, Leopold of
+Belgium, as a private individual, had shown much interest in the
+development of the Congo. The opening up of that territory was
+apparently his hobby. Out of his own pocket he paid for expeditions
+into the Congo Basin, employed German and English explorers, and
+protested against the then existing iniquities of the Arabs, who for
+ivory and slaves raided the Upper Congo. Finally, assisted by many
+geographical societies, he founded the International Association, to
+promote "civilization and trade" in Central Africa; and enlisted
+Henry M. Stanley in this service.
+
+That, in the early years, Leopold's interest in the Congo was
+unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now
+know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most
+unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking
+may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented
+himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of
+administrator of this new territory.
+
+On the face of it he seemed an admirable choice. He was a sovereign
+of a kingdom too unimportant to be feared; of the newly created
+State he undoubtedly possessed an intimate knowledge. He promised to
+give to the Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders, already for many
+years established on the Congo, his heartiest aid, and, for those
+traders still to come, to maintain the "open door." His professions
+of a desire to help the natives were profuse. He became the
+unanimous choice of the conference.
+
+Later he announced to the Powers signing the act, that from Belgium
+he had received the right to assume the title of King of the
+Independent State of the Congo. The Powers recognized his new title.
+
+The fact that Leopold, King of Belgium, was king also of the État
+Indépendant du Congo confused many into thinking that the Free State
+was a colony, or under the protection, of Belgium. As we have seen,
+it is not. A Belgian may serve in the army of the Free State, or in
+a civil capacity, as may a man of any nation, but, although with few
+exceptions only Belgians are employed in the Free State, and
+although to help the King in the Congo, the Belgian Government has
+loaned him great sums of money, politically and constitutionally the
+two governments are as independent of each other as France and
+Spain.
+
+And so, in 1885, Leopold, by the grace of fourteen governments, was
+appointed their steward over a great estate in which each of the
+governments still holds an equal right; a trustee and keeper over
+twenty millions of "black brothers" whose "moral and material
+welfare" each government had promised to protect.
+
+There is only one thing more remarkable than the fact that Leopold
+was able to turn this public market into a private park, and that
+is, that he has been permitted to do so. It is true he is a man of
+wonderful ability. For his own ends he is a magnificent organizer.
+But in the fourteen governments that created him there have been,
+and to-day there are, men, if less unscrupulous, of quite as great
+ability; statesmen, jealous and quick to guard the rights of the
+people they represent, people who since the twelfth century have
+been traders, who since 1808 have declared slavery abolished.
+
+And yet, for twenty-five years these statesmen have watched Leopold
+disobey every provision in the act of the conference. Were they to
+visit the Congo, they could see for themselves the jungle creeping
+in and burying their trading posts, their great factories turned
+into barracks. They know that the blacks they mutually agreed to
+protect have been reduced to slavery worse than that they suffered
+from the Arabs, that hundreds of thousands of them have fled from
+the Congo, and that those that remain have been mutilated, maimed,
+or, what was more merciful, murdered. And yet the fourteen
+governments, including the United States, have done nothing.
+
+Some tell you they do not interfere because they are jealous one of
+the other; others say that it is because they believe the Congo will
+soon be taken over by Belgium, and with Belgium in control, they
+argue, they would be dealing with a responsible government, instead
+of with a pirate. But so long as Leopold is King of Belgium one
+doubts if Belgians in the Congo would rise above the level of their
+King. The English, when asked why they do not assert their rights,
+granted not only to them, but to thirteen other governments, reply
+that if they did they would be accused of "ulterior motives." What
+ulterior motives? If you pursue a pickpocket and recover your watch
+from him, are your motives in doing so open to suspicion?
+
+Personally, although this is looking some way ahead, I would like to
+see the English take over and administrate the Congo. Wherever I
+visit a colony governed by Englishmen I find under their
+administration, in spite of opium in China and gin on the West
+Coast, that three people are benefited: the Englishman, the native,
+and the foreign trader from any other part of the world. Of the
+colonies of what other country can one say the same?
+
+As a rule our present governments are not loath to protect their
+rights. But toward asserting them in the Congo they have been moved
+neither by the protests of traders, chambers of commerce,
+missionaries, the public press, nor by the cry of the black man to
+"let my people go." By only those in high places can it be
+explained. We will leave it as a curious fact, and return to the
+"Unjust Steward."
+
+His first act was to wage wars upon the Arabs. From the Soudan and
+from the East Coast they were raiding the Congo for slaves and
+ivory, and he drove them from it. By these wars he accomplished two
+things. As the defender of the slave, he gained much public credit,
+and he kept the ivory. But war is expensive, and soon he pointed out
+to the Powers that to ask him out of his own pocket to maintain
+armies in the field and to administer a great estate was unfair. He
+humbly sought their permission to levy a few taxes. It seemed a
+reasonable request. To clear roads, to keep boats upon the great
+rivers, to mark it with buoys, to maintain wood stations for the
+steamers, to improve the "moral and material welfare of the
+natives," would cost money, and to allow Leopold to bring about
+these improvements, which would be for the good of all, he was
+permitted to levy the few taxes. That was twenty years ago; to-day I
+saw none of these improvements, and the taxes have increased.
+
+From the first they were so heavy that the great trade houses, which
+for one hundred years in peace and mutual goodwill bartered with the
+natives, found themselves ruined. It was not alone the export taxes,
+lighterage dues, port dues, and personal taxes that drove them out
+of the Congo; it was the King appearing against them as a rival
+trader, the man appointed to maintain the "open door." And a trader
+with methods they could not or would not imitate. Leopold, or the
+"State," saw for the existence of the Congo only two reasons: Rubber
+and Ivory. And the collecting of this rubber and ivory was, as he
+saw it, the sole duty of the State and its officers. When he threw
+over the part of trustee and became the Arab raider he could not
+waste his time, which, he had good reason to fear, might be short,
+upon products that, if fostered, would be of value only in later
+years. Still less time had he to give to improvements that cost
+money and that would be of benefit to his successors. He wanted only
+rubber; he wanted it at once, and he cared not at all how he
+obtained it. So he spun, and still spins, the greatest of all
+"get-rich-quick" schemes; one of gigantic proportions, full of
+tragic, monstrous, nauseous details.
+
+The only possible way to obtain rubber is through the native; as
+yet, in teeming forests, the white man can not work and live. Of
+even Chinese coolies imported here to build a railroad ninety per
+cent. died. So, with a stroke of the pen, Leopold declared all the
+rubber in the country the property of the "State," and then, to make
+sure that the natives would work it, ordered that taxes be paid in
+rubber. If, once a month (in order to keep the natives steadily at
+work the taxes were ordered to be paid each month instead of once a
+year), each village did not bring in so many baskets of rubber the
+King's cannibal soldiers raided it, carried off the women as
+hostages, and made prisoners of the men, or killed and ate them. For
+every kilo of rubber brought in in excess of the quota the King's
+agent, who received the collected rubber and forwarded it down the
+river, was paid a commission. Or was "paid by results." Another
+bonus was given him based on the price at which he obtained the
+rubber. If he paid the native only six cents for every two pounds,
+he received a bonus of three cents, the cost to the State being but
+nine cents per kilo, but, if he paid the natives twelve cents for
+every two pounds, he received as a bonus less than one cent. In a
+word, the more rubber the agent collected the more he personally
+benefited, and if he obtained it "cheaply" or for nothing--that is,
+by taking hostages, making prisoners, by the whip of hippopotamus
+hide, by torture--so much greater his fortune, so much richer
+Leopold.
+
+ [Illustration: A Village on the Kasai River.]
+
+Few schemes devised have been more cynical, more devilish, more
+cunningly designed to incite a man to cruelty and abuse. To
+dishonesty it was an invitation and a reward. It was this system of
+"payment by results," evolved by Leopold sooner than allow his
+agents a fixed and sufficient wage, that led to the atrocities.
+
+One result of this system was that in seven years the natives
+condemned to slavery in the rubber forests brought in rubber to the
+amount of fifty-five millions of dollars. But its chief results were
+the destruction of entire villages, the flight from their homes in
+the Congo of hundreds of thousands of natives, and for those that
+remained misery, death, the most brutal tortures and degradations,
+unprintable, unthinkable.
+
+I am not going to enter into the question of the atrocities. In the
+Congo the tip has been given out from those higher up at Brussels to
+"close up" the atrocities; and for the present the evil places in
+the Tenderloin and along the Broadway of the Congo are tightly shut.
+But at those lonely posts, distant a month to three months' march
+from the capital, the cruelties still continue. I did not see them.
+Neither, last year, did a great many people in the United States see
+the massacre of blacks in Atlanta. But they have reason to believe
+it occurred. And after one has talked with the men and women who
+have seen the atrocities, has seen in the official reports that
+those accused of the atrocities do not deny having committed them,
+but point out that they were merely obeying orders, and after one
+has seen that even at the capital of Boma all the conditions of
+slavery exist, one is assured that in the jungle, away from the
+sight of men, all things are possible. Merchants, missionaries, and
+officials even in Leopold's service told me that if one could spare
+a year and a half, or a year, to the work in the hinterland he would
+be an eye-witness of as cruel treatment of the natives as any that
+has gone before, and if I can trust myself to weigh testimony and
+can believe my eyes and ears I have reason to know that what they
+say is true. I am convinced that to-day a man, who feels that a year
+and a half is little enough to give to the aid of twenty millions of
+human beings, can accomplish in the Congo as great and good work as
+that of the Abolitionists.
+
+Three years ago atrocities here were open and above-board. For
+instance. In the opinion of the State the soldiers, in killing game
+for food, wasted the State cartridges, and in consequence the
+soldiers, to show their officers that they did not expend the
+cartridges extravagantly on antelope and wild boar, for each empty
+cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or
+child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts
+along the river. They are no longer in evidence. Neither is the
+flower-bed of Lieutenant Dom, which was bordered with human skulls.
+A quaint conceit.
+
+The man to blame for the atrocities, for each separate atrocity, is
+Leopold. Had he shaken his head they would have ceased. When the hue
+and cry in Europe grew too hot for him and he held up his hand they
+did cease. At least along the main waterways. Years before he could
+have stopped them. But these were the seven fallow years, when
+millions of tons of red rubber were being dumped upon the wharf at
+Antwerp; little, roughly rolled red balls, like pellets of
+coagulated blood, which had cost their weight in blood, which would
+pay Leopold their weight in gold.
+
+He can not plead ignorance. Of all that goes on in his big
+plantation no man has a better knowledge. Without their personal
+honesty, he follows every detail of the "business" of his rubber
+farm with the same diligence that made rich men of George Boldt and
+Marshall Field. Leopold's knowledge is gained through many spies, by
+voluminous reports, by following up the expenditure of each centime,
+of each arm's-length of blue cloth. Of every Belgian employed on
+his farm, and ninety-five per cent. are Belgians, he holds the
+_dossier_; he knows how many kilos a month the agent whips out of
+his villages, how many bottles of absinthe he smuggles from the
+French side, whether he lives with one black woman or five, why his
+white wife in Belgium left him, why he left Belgium, why he dare not
+return. The agent knows that Leopold, King of the Belgians, knows,
+and that he has shared that knowledge with the agent's employer, the
+man who by bribes of rich bonuses incites him to crime, the man who
+could throw him into a Belgian jail, Leopold, King of the Congo.
+
+The agent decides for him it is best to please both Leopolds, and
+Leopold makes no secret of what best pleases him. For not only is he
+responsible for the atrocities, in that he does not try to suppress
+them, but he is doubly guilty in that he has encouraged them. This
+he has done with cynical, callous publicity, without effort at
+concealment, without shame. Men who, in obtaining rubber, committed
+unspeakable crimes, the memory of which makes other men
+uncomfortable in their presence, Leopold rewarded with rich
+bonuses, pensions, higher office, gilt badges of shame, and rapid
+advancement. To those whom even his own judges sentenced to many
+years' imprisonment he promptly granted the royal pardon, promoted,
+and sent back to work in the vineyard.
+
+"That is the sort of man for _me_," his action seemed to say. "See
+how I value that good and faithful servant. That man collected much
+rubber. You observe I do not ask how he got it. I will not ask you.
+All you need do is to collect rubber. Use our improved methods. Gum
+copal rubbed in the kinky hair of the chief and then set on fire
+burns, so my agents tell me, like vitriol. For collecting rubber the
+chief is no longer valuable, but to his successor it is an
+object-lesson. Let me recommend also the _chicotte_, the torture
+tower, the 'hostage' house, and the crucifix. Many other stimulants
+to labor will no doubt suggest themselves to you and to your
+cannibal 'sentries.' Help to make me rich, and don't fear the
+'State.' '_L'Etat, c'est moi!_' Go as far as you like!"
+
+I said the degradations and tortures practised by the men "working
+on commission" for Leopold are unprintable, but they have been
+printed, and those who wish to read a calmly compiled, careful, and
+correct record of their deeds will find it in the "Red Rubber" of
+Mr. E.R. Morel. An even better book by the same authority, on the
+whole history of the State, is his "King Leopold's Rule in the
+Congo." Mr. Morel has many enemies. So, early in the nineteenth
+century, had the English Abolitionists, Wilberforce and Granville
+Sharp. After they were dead they were buried in the Abbey, and their
+portraits were placed in the National Gallery. People who wish to
+assist in freeing twenty millions of human beings should to-day
+support Mr. Morel. It will be of more service to the blacks than,
+after he is dead, burying him in Westminster Abbey.
+
+Mr. Morel, the American and English missionaries, and the English
+Consul, Roger Casement, and other men, in Belgium, have made a
+magnificent fight against Leopold; but the Powers to whom they have
+appealed have been silent. Taking courage of this silence, Leopold
+has divided the Congo into several great territories in which the
+sole right to work rubber is conceded to certain persons. To those
+who protested that no one in the Congo "Free" State but the King
+could trade in rubber, Leopold, as an answer, pointed with pride at
+the preserves of these foreigners. And he may well point at them
+with pride, for in some of those companies he owns a third, and in
+most of them he holds a half, or a controlling interest. The
+directors of the foreign companies are his cronies, members of his
+royal household, his brokers, bankers. You have only to read the
+names published in the lists of the Brussels Stock Exchange to see
+that these "trading companies," under different aliases, are
+Leopold. Having, then, "conceded" the greater part of the Congo to
+himself, Leopold set aside the best part of it, so far as rubber is
+concerned, as a _Domaine Privé_. Officially the receipts of this pay
+for running the government, and for schools, roads and wharfs, for
+which taxes were levied, but for which, after twenty years, one
+looks in vain. Leopold claims that through the Congo he is out of
+pocket; that this carrying the banner of civilization in Africa
+does not pay. Through his press bureaus he tells that his sympathy
+for his black brother, his desire to see the commerce of the world
+busy along the Congo, alone prevents him giving up what is for him a
+losing business. There are several answers to this. One is that in
+the Kasai Company alone Leopold owns 2,010 shares of stock. Worth
+originally $50 a share, the value of each share rose to $3,100,
+making at one time his total shares worth $5,421,000. In the
+A.B.I.R. Concession he owns 1,000 shares, originally worth $100
+each, later worth $940. In the "vintage year" of 1900 each of these
+shares was worth $5,050, and the 1,000 shares thus rose to the value
+of $5,050,000.
+
+These are only two companies. In most of the others half the shares
+are owned by the King.
+
+As published in the "State Bulletin," the money received in eight
+years for rubber and ivory gathered in the _Domaine Privé_ differs
+from the amount given for it in the market at Antwerp. The official
+estimates show a loss to the government. The actual sales show that
+the government, over and above its own estimate of its expenses,
+instead of losing, made from the _Domaine Privé_ alone $10,000,000.
+We are left wondering to whom went that unaccounted-for $10,000,000.
+Certainly the King would not take it, for, to reimburse himself for
+his efforts, he early in the game reserved for himself another tract
+of territory known as the _Domaine de la Couronne_. For years he
+denied that this existed. He knew nothing of Crown Lands. But, at
+last, in the Belgian Chamber, it was publicly charged that for years
+from this private source, which he had said did not exist, Leopold
+had been drawing an income of $15,000,000. Since then the truth of
+this statement has been denied, but at the time in the Chamber it
+was not contradicted.
+
+To-day, grown insolent by the apathy of the Powers, Leopold finds
+disguising himself as a company, as a laborer worthy of his hire,
+irksome. He now decrees that as "Sovereign" over the Congo all of
+the Congo belongs to him. It is as much his property as is a
+pheasant drive, as is a staked-out mining claim, as your hat is your
+property. And the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are there
+only on his sufferance. They are his "tenants." He permits each
+the hut in which he lives, and the garden adjoining that hut, but
+his work must be for Leopold, and everything else, animal, mineral,
+or vegetable, belongs to Leopold. The natives not only may not sell
+ivory or rubber to independent traders, but if it is found in their
+possession it is seized; and if you and I bought a tusk of ivory
+here it would be taken from us and we could be prosecuted. This is
+the law. Other men rule over territories more vast even than the
+Congo. The King of England rules an empire upon which the sun never
+sets. But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even
+the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could
+not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going
+into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa
+and saying: "This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must
+not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American. If they
+buy from you they are 'receivers of stolen goods.' To feed my
+soldiers you must drag my river for my fish. For me, in my swamp and
+in my jungle, you must toil twenty-four days of each month to
+gather my rubber. You must not hunt the elephants, for they are my
+elephants. Those tusks that fifty years ago your grandfather, with
+his naked spear, cut from an elephant, and which you have tried to
+hide from me under the floor of this hut, are my ivory. Because that
+elephant, running wild through the jungle fifty years ago, belonged
+to me. And you yourself are mine, your time is mine, your labor is
+mine, your wife, your children, all are mine. They belong to me."
+
+ [Illustration: "Tenants" of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+ Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+ Tenants.]
+
+This, then, is the "open door" as I find it to-day in the Congo. It
+is an incredible state of affairs, so insolent, so magnificent in
+its impertinence, that it would be humorous, were it not for its
+background of misery and suffering, for its hostage houses, its
+chain gangs, its _chicottes_, its nameless crimes against the human
+body, its baskets of dried hands held up in tribute to the Belgian
+blackguard.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO
+
+
+Leopold's "shop" has its front door at Banana. Its house flag is a
+golden star on a blue background. Banana is the port of entry to the
+Congo. You have, no doubt, seen many ports of Europe--Antwerp,
+Hamburg, Boulogne, Lisbon, Genoa, Marseilles. Banana is the port of
+entry to a country as large as Western Europe, and while the imports
+and exports of Europe trickle through all these cities, the commerce
+of the Congo enters and departs entirely at Banana. You can then
+picture the busy harbor, the jungle of masts, the white bridges and
+awnings of the steamers. By the fat funnels and the flags you can
+distinguish the English tramps, the German merchantmen, the French,
+Dutch, Italian, Portuguese traders, the smart "liners" from
+Liverpool, even the Arab dhows with bird-wing sails, even the steel,
+four-masted schooners out of Boston, U.S.A. You can imagine the
+toiling lighters, the slap-dash tenders, the launches with shrieking
+whistles.
+
+Of course, you suspect it is not a bit like that. But were it for
+fourteen countries the "open door" to twenty millions of people,
+that is how it might look.
+
+Instead, it is the private entrance to the preserves of a private
+individual. So what you really see is, on the one hand, islands of
+mangrove bushes, with their roots in the muddy water; on the other,
+Banana, a strip of sand and palm trees without a wharf, quay,
+landing stage, without a pier to which you could make fast anything
+larger than a rowboat.
+
+In a canoe naked natives paddle alongside to sell fish; a peevish
+little man in a sun hat, who, in order to save Leopold three
+salaries, holds four port offices, is being rowed to the gangway; on
+shore the only other visible inhabitant of Banana, a man with no
+nerves, is disturbing the brooding, sweating silence by knocking the
+rust off the plates of a stranded mud-scow. Welcome to our city!
+Welcome to busy, bustling Banana, the port of entry of the Congo
+Free State.
+
+ [Illustration: The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+ Entry to the Congo, Are Limited.]
+
+In a canoe we were paddled to the back yard of the café of Madame
+Samuel, and from that bower of warm beer and sardine tins trudged
+through the sun up one side of Banana and down the other. In between
+the two paths were the bungalows and gardens of forty white men and
+two white women. Many of the gardens, as was most of Banana, were
+neglected, untidy, littered with condensed-milk tins. Others, more
+carefully tended, were laid out in rigid lines. With all tropical
+nature to draw upon, nothing had been imagined. The most ambitious
+efforts were designs in whitewashed shells and protruding beer
+bottles. We could not help remembering the gardens in Japan, of the
+poorest and the most ignorant coolies. Do I seem to find fault with
+Banana out of all proportion to its importance? It is because
+Banana, the Congo's most advanced post of civilization, is typical
+of all that lies beyond.
+
+From what I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy,
+malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy,
+monotonous, depressing.
+
+But on the way to Boma and, later, when I travelled on the Upper
+Congo, I thought the river more beautiful than any great river I had
+ever seen. It was full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes it ran
+between palm-covered banks of yellow sand as low as those of the
+Mississippi or the Nile; and again, in half an hour, the banks were
+rock and as heavily wooded as the mountains of Montana, or as white
+and bold as the cliffs of Dover, or we passed between great hills,
+covered with what looked like giant oaks, and with their peaks
+hidden in the clouds. I found it like no other river, because in
+some one particular it was like them all. Between Banana and Boma
+the banks first screened us in with the tangled jungle of the
+tropics, and then opened up great wind-swept plateaux, leading to
+hills that suggested--of all places--England, and, at that,
+cultivated England. The contour of the hills, the shape of the
+trees, the shade of their green contrasted with the green of the
+grass, were like only the cliffs above Plymouth. One did not look
+for native kraals and the wild antelope, but for the square,
+ivy-topped tower of the village church, the loaf-shaped hayricks,
+slow-moving masses of sheep. But this that looks like a pasture
+land is only coarse limestone covered with bitter, unnutritious
+grass, which benefits neither beast nor man.
+
+At sunset we anchored in the current three miles from Boma, and at
+daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the
+government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor,
+who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper
+and as a king by divine right. He is a figurehead. The real
+administrator is M. Vandamme, the Secrétaire-Général, the
+ubiquitous, the mysterious, whose name before you leave Southampton
+is in the air, of whom all men, whether they speak in French or
+English, speak well. It is from Boma that M. Vandamme sends
+collectors of rubber, politely labeled inspecteurs, directeurs,
+judges, capitaines, and sous-lieutenants to their posts, and
+distributes them over one million square miles.
+
+Boma is the capital of a country which is as large as six nations of
+the European continent. For twenty-five years it has been the
+capital. Therefore, the reader already guesses that Boma has only
+one wharf, and at that wharf there is no custom-house, no warehouse,
+not even a canvas awning under which, during the six months of rainy
+season, one might seek shelter for himself and his baggage.
+
+Our debarkation reminded me of a landing of filibusters. A wharf
+forty yards long led from the steamer to the bank. Down this marched
+the officers of the army, the clerks, the bookkeepers, and on the
+bank and in the street each dumped his boxes, his sword, his
+camp-bed, his full-dress helmet. It looked as though a huge eviction
+had taken place, as though a retreating army, having gained the
+river's edge, were waiting for a transport. It was not as though to
+the government the coming of these gentlemen was a complete
+surprise; regularly every three weeks at that exact spot a like
+number disembark. But in years the State has not found it worth
+while to erect for them even an open zinc shed. The cargo invoiced
+to the State is given equal consideration.
+
+"Prisoners of the State," each wearing round his neck a steel ring
+from which a chain stretches to the ring of another "prisoner,"
+carried the cargo to the open street, where lay the luggage of the
+officers, and there dropped it. Mingled with steamer chairs, tin
+bathtubs, gun-cases, were great crates of sheet iron, green boxes of
+gin, bags of Teneriffe potatoes, boilers of an engine. Upon the
+scene the sun beat with vicious, cruel persistence. Those officers
+who had already served in the Congo dropped their belongings under
+the shadow of a solitary tree. Those who for the first time were
+seeing the capital of the country they had sworn to serve sank upon
+their boxes and, with dismay in their eyes, mopped their red and
+dripping brows.
+
+ [Illustration: "Prisoners" of the State in Chains at Matadi.]
+
+Boma is built at the foot of a hill of red soil. It is a town of
+scattered buildings made of wood and sheet-iron plates, sent out in
+crates, and held together with screws. To Boma nature has been
+considerate. She has contributed many trees, two or three long
+avenues of palms, and in the many gardens caused flowers to blossom
+and flourish. In the report of the "Commission of Enquiry" which
+Leopold was forced to send out in 1904 to investigate the
+atrocities, and each member of which, for his four months' work,
+received $20,000, Boma is described as possessing "the daintiness
+and _chic_ of a European watering-place."
+
+Boma really is like a seaport of one of the Central American republics.
+It has a temporary sufficient-to-the-day-for-to-morrow-we-die air.
+It looks like a military post that at any moment might be abandoned.
+To remove this impression the State has certain exhibits which seem
+to point to a stable and good government. There is a well-conducted
+hospital and clean, well-built barracks; for the amusement of the
+black soldiers even a theatre, and for the higher officials
+attractive bungalows, a bandstand, where twice a week a negro band
+plays by ear, and plays exceedingly well. There is even a
+lawn-tennis court, where the infrequent visitor to the Congo is
+welcomed, and, by the courteous Mr. Vandamme, who plays tennis as
+well as he does every thing else, entertained. Boma is the shop
+window of Leopold's big store. The good features of Boma are like
+those attractive articles one sometimes sees in a shop window, but
+which in the shop one fails to find--at least, I did not find them
+in the shop. Outside of Boma I looked in vain for a school
+conducted by the State, like the one at Boma, such as those the
+United States Government gave by the hundred to the Philippines. I
+found not one. And I looked for such a hospital as the one I saw at
+Boma, such as our government has placed for its employes along, and
+at both ends of, the Isthmus of Panama, and, except for the one at
+Leopoldville, I saw none.
+
+In spite of the fact that Boma is a "European watering-place," all
+the servants of the State with whom I talked wanted to get away from
+it, especially those who already had served in the interior. To
+appreciate what Boma lacks one has only to visit the neighboring
+seaports on the same coast; the English towns of Sierra Leone and
+Calabar, the French town of Libreville in the French Congo, the
+German seaport Duala in the Cameroons, but especially Calabar in
+Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years
+younger than Boma, and in its municipal government, its
+street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons,
+hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital;
+it is the distributing factory for a huge trading concern, and a
+particularly selfish one. There is, as I have said, only one wharf,
+and at that wharf, without paying the State, only State boats may
+discharge cargo, so the English, Dutch, and German boats are forced
+to "tie up" along the river front. There the grass is eight feet
+high and breeds mosquitoes and malaria, and conceals the wary
+crocodile. At night, from the deck of the steamer, all one can see
+of this capital is a fringe of this high grass in the light from the
+air ports, and on shore three gas-lamps. No cafés are open, no
+sailors carouse, no lighted window suggests that some one is giving
+a dinner, that some one is playing bridge. Darkness, gloom, silence
+mark this "European watering-place."
+
+"You ask me," demanded a Belgian lieutenant one night as we stood
+together by the rail, "whether I like better the bush, where there
+is no white man in a hundred miles, or to be stationed at Boma?"
+
+He threw out his hands at the gas-lamps, rapidly he pointed at each
+of them in turn.
+
+"Voilà, Boma!" he said.
+
+From Boma we steamed six hours farther up the river to Matadi. On
+the way we stopped at Noqui, the home of Portuguese traders on the
+Portuguese bank, which, as one goes up-stream, lies to starboard.
+Here the current runs at from four to five miles an hour, and has so
+sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with
+the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used
+more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to
+see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank
+looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her
+propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, cutting
+the eel-grass.
+
+At Matadi the Congo makes one of her lightning changes. Her banks,
+which have been low and woody, with, on the Portuguese side,
+glimpses of boundless plateaux, become towering hills of rock. At
+Matadi the cataracts and rapids begin, and for two hundred miles
+continue to Stanley Pool, which is the beginning of the Upper Congo.
+Leopoldville is situated on Stanley Pool, just to the right of where
+the rapids start their race to the south. With Leopoldville above
+and Boma below, still nearer the mouth of the river, Matadi makes a
+centre link in the chain of the three important towns of the Lower
+Congo.
+
+When Henry M. Stanley was halted by the cataracts and forced to
+leave the river he disembarked his expedition on the bank opposite
+Matadi, and a mile farther up-stream. It was from this point he
+dragged and hauled his boats, until he again reached smooth water at
+Stanley Pool. The wagons on which he carried the boats still can be
+seen lying on the bank, broken and rusty. Like the sight of old gun
+carriages and dismantled cannon, they give one a distinct thrill.
+Now, on the bank opposite from where they lie, the railroad runs
+from Matadi to Leopoldville.
+
+The Congo forces upon one a great admiration for Stanley. Unless
+civilization utterly alters it, it must always be a monument to his
+courage, and as you travel farther and see the difficulties placed
+in his way, your admiration increases. There are men here who make
+little of what Stanley accomplished; but they are men who seldom
+leave their own compound, and, who, when they do go up the river,
+travel at ease, not in a canoe, or on foot through the jungle, but
+in the smoking-room of the steamer and in a first-class railroad
+carriage. That they are able so to travel is due to the man they
+would belittle. The nickname given to Stanley by the natives is
+to-day the nickname of the government. Matadi means rock. When
+Stanley reached the town of Matadi, which is surrounded entirely by
+rock, he began with dynamite to blast roads for his caravan. The
+natives called him Bula Matadi, the Breaker of Rocks, and, as in
+those days he was the Government, the Law, and the Prophets, Bula
+Matadi, who then was the white man who governed, now signifies the
+white man's government. But it is a very different government, and a
+very different white man. With the natives the word is universal.
+They say "Bula Matadi wood post." "Not traders' chop, Bula Matadi's
+chop." "Him no missionary steamer, him Bula Matadi steamer."
+
+The town of Matadi is of importance as the place where, owing to the
+rapids, passengers and cargoes are reshipped on the railroad to the
+_haut Congo_. It is a railroad terminus only, and it looks it. The
+railroad station and store-houses are close to the river bank, and,
+spread over several acres of cinders, are the railroad yard and
+machine shops. Above those buildings of hot corrugated zinc and the
+black soil rises a great rock. It is not so large as Gibraltar, or
+so high as the Flatiron Building, but it is a little more steep than
+either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat
+stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove
+lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their
+surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your
+stomach, and the soles of your mosquito boots. The three streets
+lead to a parade ground no larger than and as bare as a brickyard.
+It is surrounded by the buildings of Bula Matadi, the post-office,
+the custom-house, the barracks, and the Café Franco-Belge. It has a
+tableland fifty yards wide of yellow clay so beaten by thousands of
+naked feet, so baked by the heat, that it is as hard as a brass
+shield. Other tablelands may be higher, but this is the one nearest
+the sun. You cross it wearily, in short rushes, with your heart in
+your throat, and seeking shade, as a man crossing the zone of fire
+seeks cover from the bullets. When you reach the cool, dirty
+custom-house, with walls two feet thick, you congratulate yourself
+on your escape; you look back into the blaze of the flaming plaza
+and wonder if you have the courage to return.
+
+ [Illustration: Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade.]
+
+At the custom-house I paid duty on articles I could not possibly
+have bought anywhere in the Congo, as, for instance, a tent and a
+folding-bed, and for a license to carry arms. A young man with a
+hammer and tiny branding irons beat little stars and the number of
+my license to _porter d'armes_ on the stock of each weapon. Without
+permission of Bula Matadi on leaving the Congo, one can not sell his
+guns, or give them away. This is a precaution to prevent weapons
+falling into the hands of the native. For some reason a native with
+a gun alarms Bula Matadi. Just on the other bank of the river the
+French, who do not seem to fear the black brother, sell him
+flint-lock rifles, as many as his heart desires.
+
+On the steamer there was a mild young missionary coming out, for the
+first time, to whom some unobserving friend had given a fox-terrier.
+The young man did not care for the dog. He had never owned a dog,
+and did not know what to do with this one. Her name was "Fanny,"
+and only by the efforts of all on board did she reach the Congo
+alive. There was no one, from the butcher to the captain, including
+the passengers, who had not shielded Fanny from the cold, and later
+from the sun, fed her, bathed her, forced medicine down her throat,
+and raced her up and down the spar deck. Consequently we all knew
+Fanny, and it was a great shock when from the custom-house I saw her
+running around the blazing parade ground, her eyes filled with fear
+and "lost dog" written all over her, from her drooping tongue to her
+drooping tail. Captain Burton and I called "Fanny," and, not seeking
+suicide for ourselves, sent half a dozen black boys to catch her.
+But Fanny never liked her black uncles; on the steamer the Kroo boys
+learned to give her the length of her chain, and so we were forced
+to plunge to her rescue into the valley of heat. Perhaps she thought
+we were again going to lock her up on the steamer, or perhaps that
+it was a friendly game, for she ran from us as fast as from the
+black boys. In Matadi no one ever had crossed the parade ground
+except at a funeral march, and the spectacle of two large white
+men playing tag with a small fox-terrier attracted an immense
+audience. The officials and clerks left work and peered between the
+iron-barred windows, the "prisoners" in chains ceased breaking rock
+and stared dumbly from the barracks, the black "sentries" shrieked
+and gesticulated, the naked bush boys, in from a long caravan
+journey, rose from the side of their burdens and commented upon our
+manoeuvres in gloomy, guttural tones. I suspect they thought we
+wanted Fanny for "chop." Finally Fanny ran into the legs of a German
+trader, who grabbed her by the neck and held her up to us.
+
+"You want him? Hey?" he shouted.
+
+"Ay, man," gasped Burton, now quite purple, "did you think we were
+trying to amuse the dog?"
+
+I made a leash of my belt, and the captain returned to the ship
+dragging his prisoner after him. An hour later I met the youthful
+missionary leading Fanny by a rope.
+
+"I must tell you about Fanny," he cried. "After I took her to the
+Mission I forgot to tie her up--as I suppose I should have done--and
+she ran away. But, would you believe it, she found her way straight
+back to the ship. Was it not intelligent of her?"
+
+I was too far gone with apoplexy, heat prostration, and sunstroke to
+make any answer, at least one that I could make to a missionary.
+
+The next morning Fanny, the young missionary, and I left for
+Leopoldville on the railroad. It is a narrow-gauge railroad built
+near Matadi through the solid rock and later twisting and turning so
+often that at many places one can see the track on three different
+levels. It is not a State road, but was built and is owned by a
+Dutch company, and, except that it charges exorbitant rates and does
+not keep its carriages clean, it is well run, and the road-bed is
+excellent. But it runs a passenger train only three times a week,
+and though the distance is so short, and though the train starts at
+6:30 in the morning, it does not get you to Leopoldville the same
+day. Instead, you must rest over night at Thysville and start at
+seven the next morning. That afternoon at three you reach
+Leopoldville. For the two hundred and fifty miles the fare is two
+hundred francs, and one is limited to sixty pounds of luggage. That
+was the weight allowed by the Japanese to each war correspondent,
+and as they gave us six months in Tokio in which to do nothing else
+but weigh our equipment, I left Matadi without a penalty. Had my
+luggage exceeded the limit, for each extra pound I would have had to
+pay the company ten cents. To the Belgian officers and agents who go
+for three years to serve the State in the bush the regulation is
+especially harsh, and in a company so rich, particularly mean. To
+many a poor officer, and on the pay they receive there are no rich
+ones, the tax is prohibitive. It forces them to leave behind
+medicines, clothing, photographic supplies, all ammunition, which
+means no chance of helping out with duck and pigeon the daily menu
+of goat and tinned sausages, and, what is the greatest hardship, all
+books. This regulation, which the State permitted to the
+concessionaires of the railroad, sends the agents of the State into
+the wilderness physically and mentally unequipped, and it is no
+wonder the weaker brothers go mad, and act accordingly.
+
+My black boys travelled second-class, which means an open car with
+narrow seats very close together and a wooden roof. On these cars
+passengers are allowed twenty pounds of luggage and permitted to
+collect two hundred and fifty miles of heat and dust. To a black boy
+twenty pounds is little enough, for he travels with much more
+baggage than an average "blanc." I am not speaking of the Congo boy.
+All the possessions the State leaves him he could carry in his
+pockets, and he has no pockets. But wherever he goes the Kroo boy,
+Mendi boy, or Sierra Leone boy carries all his belongings with him
+in a tin trunk painted pink, green, or yellow. He is never separated
+from his "box," and the recognized uniform of a Kroo boy at work, is
+his breechcloth, and hanging from a ribbon around his knee, the key
+to his box. If a boy has no box he generally carries three keys.
+
+In the first-class car were three French officers en route to
+Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo, and a dog, a sad
+mongrel, very dirty, very hungry. On each side of the tiny toy car
+were six revolving-chairs, so the four men, not to speak of the dog,
+quite filled it. And to our own bulk each added hand-bags, cases of
+beer, helmets, gun-cases, cameras, water-bottles, and, as the road
+does not supply food of any kind, his chop-box. A chop-box is
+anything that holds food, and for food of every kind, for the hours
+of feeding, and the verb "to feed," on the West Coast, the only
+word, the "lazy" word, is "chop."
+
+The absent-minded young missionary, with Fanny jammed between his
+ankles, and looking out miserably upon the world, and two other
+young missionaries, travelled second-class.
+
+They were even more crowded together than were we, but not so much
+with luggage as with humanity. But as a protest against the high
+charges of the railroad the missionaries always travel in the open
+car. These three young men were for the first time out of England,
+and in any fashion were glad to start on their long journey up the
+Congo to Bolobo. To them whatever happened was a joke. It was a joke
+even when the colored "wife" of one of the French officers used the
+broad shoulders of one of them as a pillow and slept sweetly. She
+was a large, good-natured, good-looking mulatto, and at the frequent
+stations the French officer ran back to her with "white man's chop,"
+a tin of sausages, a pineapple, a bottle of beer. She drank the
+beer from the bottle, and with religious tolerance offered it to the
+Baptists. They assured her without the least regret that they were
+teetotalers. To the other blacks in the open car the sight of a
+white man waiting on one of their own people was a thrilling
+spectacle. They regarded the woman who could command such services
+with respect. It would be interesting to know what they thought of
+the white man. At each station the open car disgorged its occupants
+to fill with water the beer bottle each carried, and to buy from the
+natives kwango, the black man's bread, a flaky, sticky flour that
+tastes like boiled chestnuts; and pineapples at a franc for ten. And
+such pineapples! Not hard and rubber-like, as we know them at home,
+but delicious, juicy, melting in the mouth like hothouse grapes,
+and, also, after each mouthful, making a complete bath necessary.
+One of the French officers had a lump of ice which he broke into
+pieces and divided with the others. They saluted magnificently many
+times, and as each drowned the morsel in his tin cup of beer, one of
+them cried with perfect simplicity: "C'est Paris!" This reminded me
+that the ship's steward had placed much ice in my chop basket, and I
+carried some of it to another car in which were five of the White
+Sisters. For nineteen days I had been with them on the steamer, but
+they had spoken to no one, and I was doubtful how they would accept
+my offering. But the Mother Superior gave permission, and they took
+the ice through the car window, their white hoods bristling with the
+excitement of the adventure. They were on their way to a post still
+two months' journey up the river, nearly to Lake Tanganyika, and for
+three years or, possibly, until they died, that was the last ice
+they would see.
+
+At Bongolo station the division superintendent came in the car and
+everybody offered him refreshment, and in return he told us, in the
+hope of interesting us, of a washout, and then casually mentioned
+that an hour before an elephant had blocked the track. It seemed so
+much too good to be true that I may have expressed some doubt, for
+he said: "Why, of course and certainly. Already this morning one was
+at Sariski Station and another at Sipeto." And instead of looking
+out of the window I had been reading an American magazine, filched
+from the smoking-room, which was one year old!
+
+At Thysville the railroad may have opened a hotel, but when I was
+there to hunt for a night's shelter it turned you out bag and
+baggage. The French officers decided to risk a Portuguese trading
+store known as the "Ideal Hotel," and the missionaries very kindly
+gave me the freedom of their Rest House. It is kept open for
+those of the Mission who pass between the Upper and Lower Congo.
+At the station the young missionaries were met by two older
+missionaries--Mr. Weekes, who furnished the "Commission of Enquiry"
+with much evidence, which they would not, or were not allowed to,
+print, and Mr. Jennings. With them were twenty "boys" from the
+Mission and, with each of them carrying a piece of our baggage on
+his head, we climbed the hill, and I was given a clean, comfortable,
+completely appointed bedroom. Our combined chop we turned over to a
+black brother. He is the custodian of the Rest House and an
+excellent cook. While he was preparing it my boys spread out my
+folding rubber tub. Had I closed the door I should have smothered,
+so, in the presence of twenty interested black Baptists, I took an
+embarrassing but one of the most necessary baths I can remember.
+
+There still was a piece of the ice remaining, and as the interest in
+the bathtub had begun to drag I handed it to one of my audience. He
+yelled as though I had thrust into his hand a drop of vitriol, and,
+leaping in the air, threw the ice on the floor and dared any one to
+touch it. From the "personal" boys who had travelled to Matadi the
+Mission boys had heard of ice. But none had ever seen it. They
+approached it as we would a rattlesnake. Each touched it and then
+sprang away. Finally one, his eyes starting from his head,
+cautiously stroked the inoffensive brick and then licked his
+fingers. The effect was instantaneous. He assured the others it was
+"good chop," and each of them sat hunched about it on his heels,
+stroking it, and licking his fingers, and then with delighted
+thrills rubbing them over his naked body. The little block of ice
+that at Liverpool was only a "quart of water" had assumed the value
+of a diamond.
+
+Dinner was enlivened by an incident. Mr. Weekes, with orders simply
+to "fry these," had given to the assistant of the cook two tins of
+sausages. The small _chef_ presented them to us in the pan in which
+he had cooked them, but he had obeyed instructions to the letter and
+had fried the tins unopened.
+
+After dinner we sat until late, while the older men told the young
+missionaries of atrocities of which, in the twenty years and within
+the last three years, they had been witnesses. Already in Mr.
+Morel's books I had read their testimony, but hearing from the men
+themselves the tales of outrage and cruelty gave them a fresh and
+more intimate value, and sent me to bed hot and sick with
+indignation. But, nevertheless, the night I slept at Thysville was
+the only cool one I knew in the Congo. It was as cool as is a night
+in autumn at home. Thysville, between the Upper and the Lower Congo,
+with its fresh mountain air, is an obvious site for a hospital for
+the servants of the State. To the Congo it should be what Simla is
+to the sick men of India; but the State is not running hospitals. It
+is in the rubber business.
+
+All steamers for the Upper Congo and her great tributaries, whether
+they belong to the State or the Missions, start from Leopoldville.
+There they fit out for voyages, some of which last three and four
+months. So it is a place of importance, but, like Boma, it looks as
+though the people who yesterday built it meant to-morrow to move
+out. The river-front is one long dump-heap. It is a grave-yard for
+rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars. The interior of the
+principal storehouse for ships' supplies, directly in front of the
+office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old
+iron and newspapers. I should have enjoyed taking the captain of the
+port by the neck and showing him the water-front and marine shops at
+Calabar; the wharfs and quays of stone, the open places spread with
+gravel, the whitewashed cement gutters, the spare parts of
+machinery, greased and labeled in their proper shelves, even the
+condemned scrap-iron in orderly piles; the whole yard as trim as a
+battleship.
+
+On the river-front at Leopoldville a grossly fat man, collarless,
+coatless, purple-faced, perspiring, was rushing up and down. He was
+the captain of the port. Black women had assembled to greet
+returning black soldiers, and the captain was calling upon the black
+sentries to drive them away. The sentries, yelling, fell upon the
+women with their six-foot staves and beat them over the head and
+bare shoulders, and as they fled, screaming, the captain of the port
+danced in the sun shaking his fists after them and raging violently.
+Next morning I was told he had tried to calm his nerves with
+absinthe, which is not particularly good for nerves, and was
+exceedingly unwell. I was sorry for him. The picture of discipline
+afforded by the glazed-eyed official, reeling and cursing in the
+open street, had been illuminating.
+
+Although at Leopoldville the State has failed to build wharfs, the
+esthetic features of the town have not been neglected, and there is
+a pretty plaza called Stanley Park. In the centre of this plaza is a
+pillar with, at its base, a bust of Leopold, and on the top of the
+pillar a plaster-of-Paris lady, nude, and, not unlike the
+Bacchante of MacMonnies. Not so much from the likeness as from
+history, I deduced that the lady must be Cléo de Mérode. But whether
+the monument is erected to her or to Leopold, or to both of them, I
+do not know.
+
+ [Illustration: The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+ Stanley, but to Leopold.]
+
+I left Leopoldville in the _Deliverance_. Some of the State boats
+that make the long trip to Stanleyville are very large ships. They
+have plenty of deck room and many cabins. With their flat, raft-like
+hull, their paddle-wheel astern, and the covered sun deck, they
+resemble gigantic house-boats. Of one of these boats the
+_Deliverance_ was only one-third the size, but I took passage on her
+because she would give me a chance to see not only something of the
+Congo, but also one of its great tributaries, the less travelled
+Kasai. The _Deliverance_ was about sixty-five feet over all and drew
+three feet of water. She was built like a mud-scow, with a deck of
+iron plates. Amidships, on this deck, was a tiny cabin with berths
+for two passengers and standing room for one. The furnaces and
+boiler were forward, banked by piles of wood. All the river boats
+burn only wood. Her engines were in the stern. These engines and the
+driving-rod to the paddle-wheel were uncovered. This gives the
+_Deliverance_ the look of a large automobile without a tonneau. You
+were constantly wondering what had gone wrong with the carbureter,
+and if it rained what would happen to her engines. Supported on iron
+posts was an upper deck, on which, forward, stood the captain's box
+of a cabin and directly in front of it the steering-wheel. The
+telegraph, which signalled to the openwork engine below, and a
+dining table as small as a chess-board, completely filled the
+"bridge." When we sat at table the captain's boy could only just
+squeeze himself between us and the rail. It was like dining in a
+private box. And certainly no theatre ever offered such scenery, nor
+did any menagerie ever present so many strange animals.
+
+We were four white men: Captain Jensen, his engineer, and the other
+passenger, Captain Anfossi, a young Italian. Before he reached his
+post he had to travel one month on the _Deliverance_ and for another
+month walk through the jungle. He was the most cheerful and amusing
+companion, and had he been returning after three years of exile to
+his home he could not have been more brimful of spirits. Captain
+Jensen was a Dane (almost every river captain is a Swede or a Dane)
+and talked a little English, a little French, and a little Bangala.
+The mechanician was a Finn and talked the native Bangala, and
+Anfossi spoke French. After chop, when we were all assembled on the
+upper deck, there would be the most extraordinary talks in four
+languages, or we would appoint one man to act as a clearing-house,
+and he would translate for the others.
+
+On the lower deck we carried twenty "wood boys," whose duty was to
+cut wood for the furnace, and about thirty black passengers. They
+were chiefly soldiers, who had finished their period of service for
+the State, with their wives and children. They were crowded on the
+top of the hatches into a space fifteen by fifteen feet between our
+cabin door and the furnace. Around the combings of the hatches, and
+where the scuppers would have been had the _Deliverance_ had
+scuppers, the river raced over the deck to a depth of four or five
+inches. When the passengers wanted to wash their few clothes or
+themselves they carried on their ablutions and laundry work where
+they happened to be sitting. But for Anfossi and myself to go from
+our cabin to the iron ladder of the bridge it was necessary to wade
+both in the water and to make stepping stones of the passengers. I
+do not mean that we merely stepped over an occasional arm or leg. I
+mean we walked on them. You have seen a football player, in a hurry
+to make a touchdown, hurdle without prejudice both friends and foes.
+Our progress was like this. But by practice we became so expert that
+without even awakening them we could spring lightly from the plump
+stomach of a black baby to its mother's shoulder, from there leap to
+the father's ribs, and rebound upon the rungs of the ladder.
+
+ [Illustration: The _Deliverance_.]
+
+The river marched to the sea at the rate of four to five miles an
+hour. The _Deliverance_ could make about nine knots an hour, so we
+travelled at the average rate of five miles; but for the greater
+part of each day we were tied to a bank while the boys went ashore
+and cut enough wood to carry us farther. And we never travelled at
+night. Owing to the changing currents, before the sun set we ran
+into shore and made fast to a tree. I explained how in America the
+river boats used search-lights, and was told that on one boat the
+State had experimented with a searchlight, but that particular
+searchlight having got out of order the idea of night travelling was
+condemned.
+
+Ours was a most lazy progress, but one with the most beautiful
+surroundings and filled with entertainment. From our private box we
+looked out upon the most wonderful of panoramas. Sometimes we were
+closely hemmed in by mountains of light-green grass, except where,
+in the hollows, streams tumbled in tiny waterfalls between gigantic
+trees hung with strange flowering vines and orchids. Or we would
+push into great lakes of swirling brown water, dotted with flat
+islands overgrown with reed grass higher than the head of a man.
+Again the water turned blue and the trees on the banks grew into
+forests with the look of cultivated, well-cared-for parks, but with
+no sign of man, not even a mud hut or a canoe; only the strangest of
+birds and the great river beasts. Sometimes the sky was overcast and
+gray, the warm rain shut us in like a fog, and the clouds hid the
+peaks of the hills, or there would come a swift black tornado and
+the rain beat into our private box, and each would sit crouched in
+his rain coat, while the engineer smothered his driving-rods in palm
+oil, and the great drops drummed down upon the awning and drowned
+the fire in our pipes. After these storms, as though it were being
+pushed up from below, the river seemed to rise in the centre, to
+become convex. By some optical illusion, it seemed to fall away on
+either hand to the depth of three or four feet.
+
+But as a rule we had a brilliant, gorgeous sunshine that made the
+eddying waters flash and sparkle, and caused the banks of sand to
+glare like whitewashed walls, and turn the sharp, hard fronds of the
+palms into glittering sword-blades. The movement of the boat
+tempered the heat, and in lazy content we sat in our lookout box and
+smiled upon the world. Except for the throb of the engine and the
+slow splash, splash, splash of the wheel there was no sound. We
+might have been adrift in the heart of a great ocean. So complete
+was the silence, so few were the sounds of man's presence, that at
+times one almost thought that ours was the first boat to disturb the
+Congo.
+
+Although we were travelling by boat, we spent as much time on land
+as on the water. Because the _Deliverance_ burnt wood and, like an
+invading army, "lived on the country," she was always stopping to
+lay in a supply. That gave Anfossi and myself a chance to visit the
+native villages or to hunt in the forest.
+
+To feed her steamers the State has established along the river-bank
+posts for wood, and in theory at these places there always is a
+sufficient supply of wood to carry a steamer to the next post. But
+our experience was either that another steamer had just taken all
+the wood or that the boys had decided to work no more and had hidden
+themselves in the bush. The State posts were "clearings," less than
+one hundred yards square, cut out of the jungle. Sometimes only
+black men were in charge, but as a rule the _chef de poste_ was a
+lonely, fever-ridden white, whose only interest in our arrival was
+his hope that we might spare him quinine. I think we gave away as
+many grains of quinine as we received logs of wood. Empty-handed we
+would turn from the wood post and steam a mile or so farther up the
+river, where we would run into a bank, and a boy with a steel hawser
+would leap overboard and tie up the boat to the roots of a tree.
+Then all the boys would disappear into the jungle and attack the
+primeval forest. Each was supplied with a machete and was expected
+to furnish a _bras_ of wood. A _bras_ is a number of sticks about as
+long and as thick as your arm, placed in a pile about three feet
+high and about three feet wide. To fix this measure the head boy
+drove poles into the bank three feet apart, and from pole to pole at
+the same distance from the ground stretched a strip of bark. When
+each boy had filled one of these openings all the wood was carried
+on board, and we would unhitch the _Deliverance_, and she would
+proceed to burn up the fuel we had just collected. It took the
+twenty boys about four hours to cut the wood, and the _Deliverance_
+the same amount of time to burn it. It was distinctly a
+hand-to-mouth existence. As I have pointed out, when it is too dark
+to see the currents, the Congo captains never attempt to travel. So
+each night at sunset Captain Jensen ran into the bank, and as soon
+as the plank was out all the black passengers and the crew passed
+down it and spent the night on shore. In five minutes the women
+would have the fires lighted and the men would be cutting grass
+for bedding and running up little shelters of palm boughs and
+hanging up linen strips that were both tents and mosquito nets.
+
+ [Illustration: The Native Wife of a _Chef de Poste_.]
+
+In the moonlight the natives with their camp-fires and torches made
+most wonderful pictures. Sometimes for their sleeping place the
+captain would select a glade in the jungle, or where a stream had
+cut a little opening in the forest, or a sandy island, with tall
+rushes on either side and the hot African moon shining on the white
+sand and turning the palms to silver, or they would pitch camp in a
+buffalo wallow, where the grass and mud had been trampled into a
+clay floor by the hoofs of hundreds of wild animals. But the fact
+that they were to sleep where at sunrise and at sunset came
+buffaloes, elephants, and panthers, disturbed the women not at all,
+and as they bent, laughing, over the iron pots, the firelight shone
+on their bare shoulders and was reflected from their white teeth and
+rolling eyes and brazen bangles.
+
+Until late in the night the goats would bleat, babies cry, and the
+"boys" and "mammies" talked, sang, quarrelled, beat tom-toms, and
+squeezed mournful groans out of the accordion of civilization. One
+would have thought we had anchored off a busy village rather than at
+a place where, before that night, the inhabitants had been only the
+beasts of the jungle and the river.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+AMERICANS IN THE CONGO
+
+
+In trying to sum up what I found in the Congo Free State, I think
+what one fails to find there is of the greatest significance. To
+tell what the place is like, you must tell what it lacks. One must
+write of the Congo always in the negative. It is as though you
+asked: "What sort of a house is this one Jones has built?" and were
+answered: "Well, it hasn't any roof, and it hasn't any cellar, and
+it has no windows, floors, or chimneys. It's that kind of a house."
+
+When first I arrived in the Congo the time I could spend there
+seemed hopelessly inadequate. After I'd been there a month, it
+seemed to me that in a very few days any one could obtain a
+painfully correct idea of the place, and of the way it is
+administered. If an orchestra starts on an piece of music with all
+the instruments out of tune, it need not play through the entire
+number for you to know that the instruments are out of tune.
+
+The charges brought against Leopold II, as King of the Congo, are
+three:
+
+(_a_) That he has made slaves of the twenty million blacks he
+promised to protect.
+
+(_b_) That, in spite of his promise to keep the Congo open to trade,
+he has closed it to all nations.
+
+(_c_) That the revenues of the country and all of its trade he has
+retained for himself.
+
+Any one who visits the Congo and remains only two weeks will be
+convinced that of these charges Leopold is guilty. In that time he
+will not see atrocities, but he will see that the natives are
+slaves, that no foreigner can trade with them, that in the interest
+of Leopold alone the country is milked.
+
+He will see that the government of Leopold is not a government. It
+preserves the perquisites and outward signs of government. It coins
+money, issues stamps, collects taxes. But it assumes none of the
+responsibilities of government. The Congo Free State is only a great
+trading house. And in it Leopold is the only wholesale and retail
+trader. He gives a bar of soap for rubber, and makes a "turn-over"
+of a cup of salt for ivory. He is not a monarch. He is a shopkeeper.
+
+And were the country not so rich in rubber and ivory, were the
+natives not sweated so severely, he also would be a bankrupt
+shopkeeper. For the Congo is not only one vast trading post, but
+also it is a trading post badly managed. Even in the republics of
+Central America where the government changes so frequently, and
+where each new president is trying to make hay while he can, there
+is better administration, more is done for the people, the rights of
+other nations are better respected.
+
+Were the Congo properly managed, it would be one of the richest
+territories on the surface of the earth. As it is, through ignorance
+and cupidity, it is being despoiled and its people are the most
+wretched of human beings. In the White Book containing the reports
+of British vice-consuls on conditions in the Congo from April of
+last year to January of this year, Mr. Mitchell tells how the
+enslavement of the people still continues, how "they" (the
+conscripts, as they are called) "are hunted in the forest by
+soldiers, and brought in chained by the neck like criminals." They
+then, though conscripted to serve in the army, are set to manual
+labor. They are slaves. The difference between the slavery under
+Leopold and the slavery under the Arab raiders is that the Arab was
+the better and kinder master. He took "prisoners" just as Leopold
+seizes "conscripts," but he had too much foresight to destroy whole
+villages, to carry off all the black man's live stock, and to uproot
+his vegetable gardens. He purposed to return. And he did not wish to
+so terrify the blacks that to escape from him they would penetrate
+farther into the jungle. His motive was purely selfish, but his
+methods, compared with those of Leopold, were almost considerate.
+The work the State to-day requires of the blacks is so oppressive
+that they have no time, no heart, to labor for themselves.
+
+In every other colony--French, English, German--in the native
+villages I saw vegetable gardens, goats, and chickens, large,
+comfortable, three-room huts, fences, and, especially in the German
+settlement of the Cameroons at Duala, many flower gardens. In Bell
+Town at Duala I walked for miles through streets lined with such
+huts and gardens, and saw whole families, the very old as well as
+the very young, sitting contentedly in the shade of their trees, or
+at work in their gardens. In the Congo native villages I saw but one
+old person, of chickens or goats that were not to be given to the
+government as taxes I saw none, and the vegetable gardens, when
+there were any such, were cultivated for the benefit of the _chef de
+poste_, and the huts were small, temporary, and filthy. The dogs in
+the kennels on my farm are better housed, better fed, and much
+better cared for, whether ill or well, than are the twenty millions
+of blacks along the Congo River. And that these human beings are so
+ill-treated is due absolutely to the cupidity of one man, and to the
+apathy of the rest of the world. And it is due as much to the apathy
+and indifference of whoever may read this as to the silence of Elihu
+Root or Sir Edward Grey. No one can shirk his responsibility by
+sneering, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The Government of the United
+States and the thirteen other countries have promised to protect
+these people, to care for their "material and moral welfare," and
+that promise is morally binding upon the people of those countries.
+How much Leopold cares for the material welfare of the natives is
+illustrated by the prices he pays the "boys" who worked on the
+government steamer in which I went up the Kasai. They were bound on
+a three months' voyage, and for each month's work on this trip they
+were given in payment their rice and eighty cents. That is, at the
+end of the trip they received what in our money would be equivalent
+to two dollars and forty cents. And that they did not receive in
+money, but in "trade goods," which are worth about ten per cent less
+than their money value. So that of the two dollars and eighty cents
+that is due them, these black boys, who for three months sweated in
+the dark jungle cutting wood, are robbed by this King of twenty-four
+cents. One would dislike to grow rich at that price.
+
+ [Illustration: English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges.]
+
+In the French Congo I asked the traders at Libreville what they paid
+their boys for cutting mahogany. I found the price was four francs a
+day without "chop," or three and a half francs with "chop." That
+is, on one side of the river the French pay in cash for one day's
+work what Leopold pays in trade goods for the work of a month. As a
+result the natives run away to the French side, and often, I might
+almost say invariably, when at the _poste de bois_ on the Congo side
+we would find two cords of wood, on the other bank at the post for
+the French boats we would count two hundred and fifty cords of wood.
+I took photographs of the native villages in all the colonies, in
+order to show how they compared--of the French and Belgian wood
+posts, the one well stocked and with the boys lying about asleep or
+playing musical instruments, or alert to trade and barter, and on
+the Belgian side no wood, and the unhappy white man alone, and
+generally shivering with fever. Had the photographs only developed
+properly they would have shown much more convincingly than one can
+write how utterly miserable is the condition of the Congo negro. And
+the condition of the white man at the wood posts is only a little
+better. We found one man absolutely without supplies. He was only
+twenty-four hours distant from Leopoldville, but no supplies had
+been sent him. He was ill with fever, and he could eat nothing but
+milk. Captain Jensen had six cans of condensed milk, which the State
+calculated should suffice for him and his passengers for three
+months. He turned the lot over to the sick man.
+
+We found another white man at the first wood post on the Kasai just
+above where it meets the Congo. He was in bed and dangerously ill
+with enteric fever. He had telegraphed the State at Leopoldville and
+a box of medicines had been sent to him; but the State doctors had
+forgotten to enclose any directions for their use. We were as
+ignorant of medicines as the man himself, and, as it was impossible
+to move him, we were forced to leave him lying in his cot with the
+row of bottles and tiny boxes, that might have given him life,
+unopened at his elbow. It was ten days before the next boat would
+touch at his post. I do not know that it reached him in time. One
+could tell dozens of such stories of cruelty to natives and of
+injustice and neglect to the white agents.
+
+The fact that Leopold has granted to American syndicates control
+over two great territories in the Congo may bring about a better
+state of affairs, and, in any event, it may arouse public interest
+in this country. It certainly should be of interest to Americans
+that some of the most prominent of their countrymen have gone into
+close partnership with a speculator as unscrupulous and as notorious
+as is Leopold, and that they are to exploit a country which as yet
+has been developed only by the help of slavery, with all its
+attendant evils of cruelty and torture.
+
+That Leopold has no right to give these concessions is a matter
+which chiefly concerns the men who are to pay for them, but it is an
+interesting fact.
+
+The Act of Berlin expressly states: _"No Power which exercises, or
+shall exercise, sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions,
+shall be allowed to grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in
+matters of trade."_
+
+Leopold is only a steward placed by the Powers over the Congo. He is
+a janitor. And he has no more authority to give even a foot of
+territory to Belgians, Americans, or Chinamen than the janitor of an
+apartment house has authority to fill the rooms with his wife's
+relations or sell the coal in the basement.
+
+The charge that the present concessionaires have no title that any
+independent trader or miner need respect is one that is sure to be
+brought up when the Powers throw Leopold out, and begin to clean
+house. The concessionaires take a sporting chance that Leopold will
+not be thrown out. It should be remembered that it is to his and to
+their advantage to see that he is not.
+
+In November of 1906, Leopold gave the International Forestry and
+Mining Company of the Congo mining rights in territories adjoining
+his private park, the _Domaine de la Couronne_, and to the American
+Congo Company he granted the right to work rubber along the Congo
+River to where it joins the Kasai. This latter is a territory of
+four thousand square miles. The company also has the option within
+the next eleven years of buying land in any part of a district which
+is nearly one-half of the entire Congo. Of the Forestry and Mining
+Company one-half of the profits go to Leopold, one-fourth to
+Belgians, and the remaining fourth to the Americans. Of the profits
+of the American Congo Company, Leopold is entitled to one-half and
+the Americans to the other half. This company was one originally
+organized to exploit a new method of manufacturing crude rubber from
+the plant. The company was taken over by Thomas F. Ryan and his
+associates. Back of both companies are the Guggenheims, who are to
+perform the actual work in the mines and in the rubber plantation.
+Early in March a large number of miners and engineers were selected
+by John Hays Hammond, the chief engineer of the Guggenheim
+Exploration Companies, and A. Chester Beatty, and were sent to
+explore the territory granted in the mining concession. Another
+force of experts are soon to follow. The legal representative of the
+syndicates has stated that in the Congo they intend to move "on
+commercial lines." By that we take it they mean they will give the
+native a proper price for his labor; and instead of offering
+"bonuses" and "commissions" to their white employees will pay them
+living wages. The exact terms of the concessions are wrapped in
+mystery. Some say the territories ceded to the concessionaires are
+to be governed by them, policed by them, and that within the
+boundaries of these concessions the Americans are to have absolute
+control. If this be so the syndicates are entering upon an
+experiment which for Americans is almost without precedent. They
+will be virtually what in England is called a chartered company,
+with the difference that the Englishmen receive their charter from
+their own government, while the charter under which the Americans
+will act will be granted by a foreign Power, and for what they may
+do in the Congo their own government could not hold them
+responsible. They are answerable only to the Power that issued the
+charter; and that Power is the just, the humane, the merciful
+Leopold.
+
+The history of the early days of chartered companies in Africa,
+notoriously those of the Congo, Northern Nigeria, Rhodesia, and
+German Central Africa does not make pleasant reading. But until the
+Americans in the Congo have made this experiment, it would be most
+unfair (except that the company they choose to keep leaves them open
+to suspicion) not to give them the benefit of the doubt. One can at
+least say for them that they seem to be absolutely ignorant of the
+difficulties that lie before them. At least that is true of all of
+them to whom I have talked.
+
+The attorney of the Rubber Company when interviewed by a
+representative of a New York paper is reported to have said: "We
+have purchased a privilege from a Sovereign State and propose to
+operate it along purely commercial lines. With King Leopold's
+management of Congo affairs in the past, or, with _what he may do in
+an administrative way in the future, we have absolutely nothing to
+do_." The italics are mine.
+
+When asked: "Under your concessions are you given similar powers
+over the native blacks as are enjoyed by other concessionaires?" the
+answer of the attorney, as reported, was: "The problem of labor is
+not mentioned in the concession agreement, neither is the question
+of local administration. We are left to solve the labor problem in
+our own way, on a purely commercial basis, and with the question of
+government we have absolutely nothing whatever to do. The labor
+problem will not be formidable. Our mills are simple affairs. One
+man can manage them, and the question of the labor on the rubber
+concession is reduced to the minimum." This answer of the learned
+attorney shows an ignorance of "labor" conditions in the Congo which
+is, unless assumed, absolutely abject.
+
+If the American syndicates are not to police and govern the
+territories ceded them, but if these territories are to continue to
+be administered by Leopold, it is not possible for the Americans to
+have "absolutely nothing to do" with that administration. Leopold's
+sole idea of administration is that every black man is his slave, in
+other words, the only men the Americans can depend upon for labor
+are slaves. Of the profits of these American companies Leopold is to
+receive one-half. He will work his rubber with slaves.
+
+Are the Americans going to use slaves also, or do they intend "on
+commercial lines" to pay those who work for them living wages? And
+if they do, at the end of the fiscal year, having paid a fair price
+for labor, are they prepared to accept a smaller profit than will
+their partner Leopold, who obtains his labor with the aid of a chain
+and a whip?
+
+ [Illustration: The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+ Concessionaires Must Depend.]
+
+The attorney for the company airily says: "The labor problem will
+not be formidable."
+
+If the man knows what he is talking about, he can mean but one
+thing.
+
+The motives that led Leopold to grant these concessions are possibly
+various. The motives that induced the Americans to take his offer
+were probably less complicated. With them it was no question of
+politics. They wanted the money; they did not need it, for they all
+are rich--they merely wanted it. But Leopold wants more than the
+half profits he will obtain from the Americans. If the Powers should
+wake from their apathy and try to cast him out of the Congo, he
+wants, through his American partners, the help of the United States.
+Should he be "dethroned," by granting these concessions now on a
+share and share alike basis with Belgians, French, and Americans, he
+still, through them, hopes to draw from the Congo a fair income. And
+in the meanwhile he looks to these Americans to kill any action
+against him that may be taken in our Senate and House of
+Representatives, even in the White House and Department of State.
+
+For the last two years Chester A. Beatty has been visiting Leopold
+at Belgium, and has obtained the two concessions, and Leopold has
+obtained, or hopes he has obtained, the influence of many American
+shareholders. The fact that the people of the United States
+possessed no "vested interest" in the Congo was the important fact
+that placed any action on our part in behalf of that distressed
+country above suspicion. If we acted, we did so because the United
+States, as one of the signatory Powers of the Berlin Act, had
+promised to protect the natives of the Congo; and we could truly
+claim that we acted only in the name of humanity. Leopold has now
+robbed us of that claim. He hopes that the enormous power wielded by
+the Americans with whom he is associated, will prevent any action
+against him in this country.
+
+But the deal has already been made public, and the motives of those
+who now oppose improvement of conditions in the Congo, and who
+support Leopold, will be at once suspected.
+
+To me the most interesting thing about the tract of land ceded to
+Mr. Ryan, apart from the number of hippopotamuses I saw on it, was
+that the people living along the Congo say that it is of no value.
+They told me that two years ago, after working it for some time,
+Leopold abandoned it as unprofitable, and they added that, when
+Leopold cannot whip rubber out of the forest, it is hard to believe
+that it can be obtained there legitimately by any one else. On the
+bank I saw the "factories" to which the unprofitable rubber had been
+carried from the interior. They had formerly belonged to Leopold,
+now they are the property of Mr. Ryan and of the American Congo
+Company. In only two years they already are in ruins, and the jungle
+has engulfed them.
+
+I was on the land owned by the company a dozen times or more, but I
+did not go into the interior. Even had I done so, I am not an expert
+on rubber, and would have understood nothing of Para trees, Lagos
+silk, and liane. I am speaking not of my own knowledge, only of what
+was told me by people who live on the spot. I found that this
+particular concession was well known, because, unlike the land given
+to the Forestry and Mines Company, it is not an inaccessible tract,
+but is situated only eight miles from Leopoldville. In our language,
+that is about as far as is the Battery to 160th Street. Leopoldville
+is the chief place on the Congo River, and every one there who spoke
+to me of the concession knew where it was situated, and repeated
+that it had been given up by Leopold as unprofitable, and that he
+had unloaded it on Mr. Ryan. They seem to think it very clever of
+the King to have got rid of it to the American millionaire. To one
+knowing Mr. Ryan only from what he reads of him in the public press,
+he does not seem to be the sort of man to whom Leopold could sell a
+worthless rubber plantation. However, it is a matter which concerns
+only Mr. Ryan and those who may think of purchasing shares in the
+company. The Guggenheims, who are to operate this rubber, say that
+Leopold did not know how to get out the full value of the land, and
+that they, by using the machinery they will install, will be able to
+make a profit, where Leopold, using only native labor, suffered a
+loss.
+
+To the poor the ways of the truly rich are past finding out. After a
+man has attained a fortune sufficient to keep him in yachts and
+automobiles, one would think he could afford to indulge himself in
+the luxury of being squeamish; that as to where he obtained any
+further increase of wealth, he would prefer to pick and choose.
+
+On the contrary, these Americans go as far out of their way as
+Belgium to make a partner of the man who has wrung his money from
+wretched slaves, who were beaten, starved, and driven in chains.
+This concession cannot make them rich. It can only make them richer.
+And not richer in fact, for all the money they may whip out of the
+Congo could not give them one thing that they cannot now command,
+not an extra taste to the lips, not a fresh sensation, not one added
+power for good. To them it can mean only a figure in ink on a page
+of a bank-book. But what suffering, what misery it may mean to the
+slaves who put it there! Why should men as rich as these elect to go
+into partnership with one who sweats his dollars out of the naked
+black? How really fine, how really wonderful it would be if these
+same men, working together, decided to set free these twenty million
+people--if, instead of joining hands with Leopold, they would
+overthrow him and march into the Congo free men, without his chain
+around their ankles, and open it to the trade of the world, and give
+justice and a right to live and to work and to sell and buy to
+millions of miserable human beings. These Americans working together
+could do it. They could do it from Washington. Or five hundred men
+with two Maxim guns could do it. The "kingdom" of the Congo is only
+a house of cards. Five hundred filibusters could take Boma, proclaim
+the Congo open to the traders of the world, as the Act of Berlin
+declares it to be, and in a day make of Leopold the jest of Europe.
+They would only be taking possession of what has always belonged to
+them.
+
+Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
+They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty,
+or crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven
+by any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
+degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
+risking life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows,
+and for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great.
+They had the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity.
+One of them picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the
+wrist of his tunic, and said: "Look, it is our badge of shame."
+
+To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
+home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men
+and brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will,
+safe in their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard
+King.
+
+What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
+Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
+possible, a greater evil?
+
+E.R. Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the
+improvement of the Congo, has written: "It is a little difficult to
+imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of
+Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in
+slave-driving. The trouble is that they probably know nothing about
+African conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his
+detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis
+that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere
+'laborers' for the white man's benefit, possessing no rights in land
+nor in the produce of the soil. If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are
+going to acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by
+'commercial methods,' we welcome their advent. But we would point
+out to them that, in such a case, they had better at once abandon
+all idea of three or four hundred per cent dividends with which the
+wily autocrat at Brussels has doubtless primed them. No such
+monstrous profits are to be acquired in tropical Africa under a
+trade system. If, on the other hand, the methods they are prepared
+to adopt are the methods King Leopold and his other concessionaires
+have adopted for the past thirteen years, devastation and
+destruction, and the raising of more large bodies of soldiers, are
+their essential accompaniments; and the widening of the area of the
+Congo hell is assured."
+
+The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise
+good to that unhappy country are that our country is represented at
+Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the
+person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual
+work of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the
+Guggenheims. They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as
+philanthropists and humanitarians of the common-sense type. Like
+other rich men of their race, they have given largely to charity and
+to assist those less fortunate than themselves.
+
+For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they
+have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it
+successfully. Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with
+fairness.
+
+"Why should you suppose," Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, "that in
+the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly? In Mexico we found the
+natives ill-paid and ill-fed. We fed them and paid them well. Not
+from any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business. It is
+not good business to cut off a workman's hands or head. We are not
+ashamed of the way we have always treated our workmen, and in the
+Congo we are not going to spoil our record."
+
+I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold,
+tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway
+to his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his
+agents might do there he could not possibly know. To this Mr.
+Guggenheim answered that "Neither Leopold nor anyone else can
+dictate how we shall treat the native labor," that if his agents
+were cruel they would be instantly dismissed, and that for what
+occurred in the Congo on the land occupied by the American Congo
+Company his brothers and himself alone were responsible, and that
+they accepted that responsibility.
+
+But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him
+into trouble, men of whose _dossiers_ he is quite ignorant.
+
+From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several
+of his "valets du roi," press agents, and tools, men who for years
+have been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the
+Americans, one, who is prominently exploited by the Belgians, had
+to leave Africa for theft.
+
+That Mr. Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the
+Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt. But that on
+Broadway, removed from the scene of operations in time some four to
+six months, and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can
+control the acts of his agents and his partners, remains to be
+proved. He is attacking a problem much more momentous than the
+handling of Mexican _peons_ or Chinese coolies, and every step of
+the working out of this problem will be watched by the people of
+this country.
+
+And should they find that the example of the Belgian concessionaires
+in their treatment of the natives is being imitated by even one of
+the American Congo Company the people of this country will know it,
+and may the Lord have mercy on his soul!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+HUNTING THE HIPPO
+
+
+Except once or twice in the Zoo, I never had seen a hippopotamus,
+and I was most anxious, before I left the Congo, to meet one. I
+wanted to look at him when he was free, and his own master, without
+iron bars or keepers; when he believed he was quite alone, and was
+enjoying his bath in peace and confidence. I also wanted to shoot
+him, and to hang in my ancestral halls his enormous head with the
+great jaws open and the inside of them painted pink and the small
+tusks hungrily protruding. I had this desire, in spite of the fact
+that for every hippo except the particular one whose head I coveted,
+I entertained the utmost good feeling.
+
+As a lad, among other beasts the hippopotamus had appealed to my
+imagination. Collectively, I had always looked upon them as most
+charming people. They come of an ancient family. Two thousand four
+hundred years ago they were mentioned by Herodotus. And Herodotus to
+the animal kingdom is what Domesday Book is to the landed gentry. To
+exist beautifully for twenty-four hundred years without a single
+mésalliance, without having once stooped to trade, is certainly a
+strong title to nobility. Other animals by contact with man have
+become degraded. The lion, the "King of Beasts," now rides a
+bicycle, and growls, as previously rehearsed, at the young woman in
+spangles, of whom he is secretly afraid. And the elephant, the
+monarch of the jungle, and of a family as ancient and noble as that
+of the hippopotamus, the monarch of the river, has become a beast of
+burden and works for his living. You can see him in Phoenix Park
+dragging a road-roller, in Siam and India carrying logs, and at
+Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn. The
+royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.
+
+But, you never see a hippopotamus chained to a road-roller, or
+riding a bicycle. He is still the gentleman, the man of elegant
+leisure, the aristocrat of aristocrats, harming no one, and, in his
+ancestral river, living the simple life.
+
+And yet, I sought to kill him. At least, one of him, but only one.
+And, that I did not kill even one, while a bitter disappointment, is
+still a source of satisfaction.
+
+In the Congo River we saw only two hippos, and both of them were
+dead. They had been shot from a steamer. If the hippo is killed in
+the water, it is impossible to recover the body at once. It sinks
+and does not rise, some say, for an hour, others say for seven
+hours. As in an hour the current may have carried the body four
+miles below where it sank, the steamer does not wait, and the
+destruction of the big beast is simple murder. There should be a law
+in the Congo to prevent their destruction, and, no doubt, if the
+State thought it could make a few francs out of protecting the
+hippo, as it makes many million francs by preserving the elephant,
+which it does for the ivory, such a law would exist. We soon saw
+many hippos, but although we could not persuade the only other
+passenger not to fire at them, there are a few hippos still alive in
+the Congo. For, the only time the Captain and I were positive he
+hit anything, was when he fired over our heads and blew off the roof
+of the bridge.
+
+When first we saw the two dead hippos, one of them was turning and
+twisting so violently that we thought he was alive. But, as we drew
+near, we saw the strange convulsions were due to two enormous and
+ugly crocodiles, who were fiercely pulling at the body. Crocodiles
+being man-eaters, we had no feelings about shooting them, either in
+the water or up a tree; and I hope we hit them. In any event, after
+we fired the body drifted on in peace.
+
+On my return trip, going with the stream, when the boat covers about
+four times the distance she makes when steaming against it, I saw
+many hippos. In one day I counted sixty-nine. But on our way up the
+Congo, until we turned into the Kasai River, we saw none.
+
+So, on the first night we camped in the Kasai I had begun to think I
+never would see one, and I went ashore both skeptical and
+discouraged. We had stopped, not at a wood post, but at a place on
+the river's bank previously untouched by man, where there was a
+stretch of beach, and then a higher level with trees and tall
+grasses. Driven deep in this beach were the footprints of a large
+elephant. They looked as though some one had amused himself by
+sinking a bucket in the mud, and then pulling it out. For sixty
+yards I followed the holes and finally lost them in a confusion of
+other tracks. The place had been so trampled upon that it was beaten
+into a basin. It looked as though every animal in the Kasai had met
+there to hold a dance. There were the deep imprints of the hippos
+and the round foot of the elephant, with the marks of the big toes
+showing as clearly as though they had been scooped out of the mud
+with a trowel, the hoofs of buffalo as large as the shoe of a cart
+horse, and the arrow-like marks of the antelope, some in dainty
+little Vs, others measuring three inches across, and three inches
+from the base to the point. They came from every direction, down the
+bank and out of the river; and crossed and recrossed, and beneath
+the fresh prints that had been made that morning at sunrise, were
+those of days before rising up sharply out of the sun-dried clay,
+like bas-reliefs in stucco. I had gone ashore in a state of mind so
+skeptical that I was as surprised as Crusoe at the sight of
+footprints. It was as though the boy who did not believe in fairies
+suddenly stumbled upon them sliding down the moonbeams. One felt
+distinctly apologetic--as though uninvited he had pushed himself
+into a family gathering. At the same time there was the excitement
+of meeting in their own homes the strange peoples I had seen only in
+the springtime, when the circus comes to New York, in the basement
+of Madison Square Garden, where they are our pitiful prisoners,
+bruising their shoulders against bars. Here they were monarchs of
+all they surveyed. I was the intruder; and, looking down at the
+marks of the great paws and delicate hoofs, I felt as much out of
+place as would a grizzly bear in a Fifth Avenue club. And I behaved
+much as would the grizzly bear. I rushed back for my rifle intent on
+killing something.
+
+The sun had just set; the moon was shining faintly: it was the
+moment the beasts of the jungle came to the river to drink. Anfossi,
+although he had spent three years in the Congo and had three years'
+contract still to work out, was as determined to kill something as
+was the tenderfoot from New York.
+
+Sixty yards from the stern of the _Deliverance_ was the basin I had
+discovered; at an equal distance from her bow, a stream plunged into
+the river. Anfossi argued the hippos would prefer to drink the clear
+water of the stream, to the muddy water of the basin, and elected to
+watch at the stream. I carried a deck chair to the edge of my basin
+and placed it in the shadow of the trees. Anfossi went into our
+cabin for his rifle. At that exact moment a hippopotamus climbed
+leisurely out of the river and plunged into the stream. One of the
+soldiers on shore saw him and rushed for the boat. Anfossi sent my
+boy on the jump for me and, like a gentleman, waited until I had
+raced the sixty yards. But when we reached the stream there was
+nothing visible but the trampled grass and great holes in the mud
+and near us in the misty moonlight river something that puffed and
+blew slowly and luxuriously, as would any fat gentleman who had been
+forced to run for it. Had I followed Anfossi's judgment and gone
+along the bank sixty yards ahead, instead of sixty yards astern of
+the _Deliverance_, at the exact moment at which I sank into my deck
+chair, the hippo would have emerged at my feet. It is even betting
+as to which of us would have been the more scared.
+
+The next day, and for days after, we saw nothing but hippos. We saw
+them floating singly and in family groups, with generally four or
+five cows to one bull, and sometimes in front a baby hippo no larger
+than a calf, which the mother with her great bulk would push against
+the swift current, as you see a tugboat in the lee of a great liner.
+Once, what I thought was a spit of rocks suddenly tumbled apart and
+became twenty hippos, piled more or less on top of each other.
+During that one day, as they floated with the current, enjoying
+their afternoon's nap, we saw thirty-four. They impressed me as the
+most idle, and, therefore, the most aristocratic of animals. They
+toil not, neither do they spin; they had nothing to do but float in
+the warm water and the bright sunshine; their only effort was to
+open their enormous jaws and yawn luxuriously, in the pure content
+of living, in absolute boredom. They reminded you only of fat gouty
+old gentlemen, puffing and blowing in the pool at the Warm Springs.
+
+The next chance we had at one of them on shore came on our first
+evening in the Kasai just before sunset. Captain Jensen was steering
+for a flat island of sand and grass where he meant to tie up for the
+night. About fifty yards from the spot for which we were making, was
+the only tree on the island, and under it with his back to us, and
+leisurely eating the leaves of the lower branches, exactly as though
+he were waiting for us by appointment, was a big gray hippo. His
+back being toward us, we could not aim at his head, and he could not
+see us. But the _Deliverance_ is not noiseless, and, hearing the
+paddle-wheel, the hippo turned, saw us, and bolted for the river.
+The hippopotamus is as much at home in the water as the seal. To get
+to the water, if he is surprised out of it, and to get under it, if
+he is alarmed while in it, is instinct. If he does venture ashore,
+he goes only a few rods from the bank and then only to forage. His
+home is the river, and he rushes to bury himself in it as naturally
+as the squirrel makes for a tree. This particular hippo ran for the
+river as fast as a horse coming at a slow trot. He was a very badly
+scared hippo. His head was high in the air, his fat sides were
+shaking, and the one little eye turned toward us was filled with
+concern. Behind him the yellow sun was setting into the lagoons. On
+the flat stretch of sand he was the only object, and against the
+horizon loomed as large as a freight car. That must be why we both
+missed him. I tried to explain that the reason I missed him was
+that, never before having seen so large an animal running for his
+life, I could not watch him do it and look at the gun sights. No one
+believed that was why I missed him. I did not believe it myself. In
+any event neither of us hit his head, and he plunged down the bank
+to freedom, carrying most of the bank with him. But, while we still
+were violently blaming each other, at about two hundred yards below
+the boat, he again waddled out of the river and waded knee deep up
+the little stream. Keeping the bunches of grass between us, I ran up
+the beach, aimed at his eye and this time hit him fairly enough.
+With a snort he rose high in the air, and so, for an instant,
+balanced his enormous bulk. The action was like that of a horse
+that rears on his hind legs, when he is whipped over the nose. And
+apparently my bullet hurt him no more than the whip the horse, for
+he dropped heavily to all fours, and again disappeared into the
+muddy river. Our disappointment and chagrin were intense, and at
+once Anfossi and I organized a hunt for that evening. To encourage
+us, while we were sitting on the bridge making a hasty dinner,
+another hippopotamus had the impertinence to rise, blowing like a
+whale, not ten feet from where we sat. We could have thrown our tin
+cups and hit him; but he was in the water, and now we were seeking
+only those on land.
+
+ [Illustration: Mr. Davis and Native "Boy," on the Kasai River.]
+
+Two years ago when the atrocities along the Kasai made the natives
+fear the white man and the white man fear the natives, each of the
+river boats was furnished with a stand of Albini rifles. Three of
+the black soldiers, who were keen sportsmen, were served with these
+muskets, and as soon as the moon rose, the soldiers and Anfossi, my
+black boy, with an extra gun, and I set forth to clear the island of
+hippos. To the stranger it was a most curious hunt. The island was
+perfectly flat and bare, and the river had eaten into it and
+overflowed it with tiny rivulets and deep, swift-running streams.
+Into these rivulets and streams the soldiers plunged, one in front,
+feeling the depth of the water with a sounding rod, and as he led we
+followed. The black men made a splendid picture. They were naked but
+for breech-cloths, and the moonlight flashed on their wet skins and
+upon the polished barrels of the muskets. But, as a sporting
+proposition, as far as I could see, we had taken on the hippopotamus
+at his own game. We were supposed to be on an island, but the water
+was up to our belts and running at five miles an hour. I could not
+understand why we had not openly and aboveboard walked into the
+river. Wading waist high in the water with a salmon rod I could
+understand, but not swimming around in a river with a gun. The force
+of the shallowest stream was the force of the great river behind it,
+and wherever you put your foot, the current, on its race to the sea,
+annoyed at the impediment, washed the sand from under the sole of
+your foot and tugged at your knees and ankles. To add to the
+interest the three soldiers held their muskets at full cock, and as
+they staggered for a footing each pointed his gun at me. There also
+was a strange fish about the size of an English sole that sprang out
+of the water and hurled himself through space. Each had a white
+belly, and as they skimmed past us in the moonlight it was as though
+some one was throwing dinner plates. After we had swum the length of
+the English Channel, we returned to the boat. As to that midnight
+hunt I am still uncertain as to whether we were hunting the hippos
+or the hippos were hunting us.
+
+The next morning we had our third and last chance at a hippo.
+
+It is distinctly a hard-luck story. We had just gone on the bridge
+for breakfast when we saw him walking slowly from us along an island
+of white sand as flat as your hand, and on which he loomed large as
+a haystack. Captain Jensen was a true sportsman. He jerked the bell
+to the engine-room, and at full speed the _Deliverance_ raced for
+the shore. The hippo heard us, and, like a baseball player caught
+off base, tried to get back to the river. Captain Jensen danced on
+the deck plates:
+
+"Schoot it! schoot it!" he yelled, "Gotfurdamn! schoot it!" When
+Anfossi and I fired, the _Deliverance_ was a hundred yards from the
+hippo, and the hippo was not five feet from the bank. In another
+instant, he would have been over it and safe. But when we fired, he
+went down as suddenly as though a safe had dropped on him. Except
+that he raised his head, and rolled it from side to side, he
+remained perfectly still. From his actions, or lack of actions, it
+looked as though one of the bullets had broken his back; and when
+the blacks saw he could not move they leaped and danced and
+shrieked. To them the death of the big beast promised much chop.
+
+But Captain Jensen was not so confident. "Schoot it," he continued
+to shout, "we lose him yet! Gotfurdamn! schoot it!"
+
+My gun was an American magazine rifle, holding five cartridges. We
+now were very near the hippo, and I shot him in the head twice, and,
+once, when he opened them, in the jaws. At each shot his head would
+jerk with a quick toss of pain, and at the sight the blacks screamed
+with delight that was primitively savage. After the last shot, when
+Captain Jensen had brought the _Deliverance_ broadside to the bank,
+the hippo ceased to move. The boat had not reached the shore before
+the boys with the steel hawser were in the water; the gangplank was
+run out, and the black soldiers and wood boys, with their knives,
+were dancing about the hippo and hacking at his tail. Their idea was
+to make him the more quickly bleed to death. I ran to the cabin for
+more cartridges. It seemed an absurd precaution. I was as sure I had
+the head of that hippo as I was sure that my own was still on my
+neck. My only difficulty was whether to hang the head in the front
+hall or in the dining-room. It might be rather too large for the
+dining-room. That was all that troubled me. After three minutes,
+when I was back on deck, the hippo still lay immovable. Certainly
+twenty men were standing about him; three were sawing off his tail,
+and the women were chanting triumphantly a song they used to sing in
+the days when the men were allowed to hunt, and had returned
+successful with food.
+
+On the bridge was Anfossi with his camera. Before the men had
+surrounded the hippo he had had time to snap one picture of it. I
+had just started after my camera, when from the blacks there was a
+yell of alarm, of rage, and amazement. The hippo had opened his
+eyes and raised his head. I shoved the boys out of the way, and,
+putting the gun close to his head, fired pointblank. I wanted to put
+him out of pain. I need not have distressed myself. The bullet
+affected him no more than a quinine pill. What seemed chiefly to
+concern him, what apparently had brought him back to life, was the
+hacking at his tail. That was an indignity he could not brook.
+
+His expression, and he had a perfectly human expression, was one of
+extreme annoyance and of some slight alarm, as though he were
+muttering: "This is no place for _me_," and, without more ado, he
+began to roll toward the river. Without killing some one, I could
+not again use the rifle. The boys were close upon him, prying him
+back with the gangplank, beating him with sticks of firewood, trying
+to rope him with the steel hawser. On the bridge Captain Jensen and
+Anfossi were giving orders in Danish and Italian, and on the bank I
+swore in American. Everybody shoved and pushed and beat at the great
+bulk, and the great bulk rolled steadily on. We might as well have
+tried to budge the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He reached the bank, he
+crushed it beneath him, and, like a suspension bridge, splashed into
+the water. Even then, we who watched him thought he would stick fast
+between the boat and the bank, that the hawser would hold him. But
+he sank like a submarine, and we stood gaping at the muddy water and
+saw him no more. When I recovered from my first rage I was glad he
+was still alive to float in the sun and puff and blow and open his
+great jaws in a luxurious yawn. I could imagine his joining his
+friends after his meeting with us, and remarking in reference to our
+bullets: "I find the mosquitoes are quite bad this morning."
+
+With this chapter is published the photograph Anfossi took, from the
+deck of the steamer, of our hippo--the hippo that was too stupid to
+know when he was dead. It is not a good photograph, but of our hippo
+it is all we have to show. I am still undecided whether to hang it
+in the hall or the dining-room.
+
+ [Illustration: The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead.]
+
+The days I spent on my trip up the river were of delightful
+sameness, sunshine by day, with the great panorama drifting past,
+and quiet nights of moonlight. For diversion, there were many
+hippos, crocodiles, and monkeys, and, though we saw only their
+tracks and heard them only in the jungle, great elephants. And
+innumerable strange birds--egrets, eagles, gray parrots, crimson
+cranes, and giant flamingoes--as tall as a man and from tip to tip
+measuring eight feet.
+
+Each day the programme was the same. The arrival at the wood post,
+where we were given only excuses and no wood, and where once or
+twice we unloaded blue cloth and bags of salt, which is the currency
+of the Upper Congo, and the halt for hours to cut wood in the
+forest.
+
+Once we stopped at a mission and noted the contrast it made with the
+bare, unkempt posts of the State. It was the Catholic mission at
+Wombali, and it was a beauty spot of flowers, thatched houses,
+grass, and vegetables. There was a brickyard, and schools, and
+sewing-machines, and the blacks, instead of scowling at us, nodded
+and smiled and looked happy and contented. The Father was a great
+red-bearded giant, who seemed to have still stored up in him all the
+energy of the North. While the steamer was unloaded he raced me
+over the vegetable garden and showed me his farm. I had seen other
+of the Catholic Missions, and I spoke of how well they looked, of
+the signs they gave of hard work, and of consideration for the
+blacks.
+
+"I am not of that Order," the Father said gravely. He was speaking
+in English, and added, as though he expected some one to resent it:
+"We are Jesuits." No one resented it, and he added: "We have our
+Order in your country. Do you know Fordham College?"
+
+Did I know it? If you are trying to find our farm, the automobile
+book tells you to leave Fordham College on your left after Jerome
+Avenue.
+
+"Of course, I know it," I said. "They have one of the best baseball
+nines near New York; they play the Giants every spring."
+
+The Reverend Father started.
+
+"They play with Giants!" he gasped.
+
+I did not know how to say "baseball nines" in French, but at least
+he was assured that whatever it was, it was one of the best near New
+York.
+
+Then Captain Jensen's little black boy ran up to tell me the
+steamer was waiting, and began in Bangalese to beg something of the
+Father. The priest smiled and left us, returning with a rosary and
+crucifix, which the boy hung round his neck, and then knelt, and the
+red-bearded Father laid his fingers on the boy's kinky head. He was
+a very happy boy over his new possession, and it was much coveted by
+all the others. One of the black mammies, to ward off evil from the
+little naked baby at her breast, offered an arm's length of blue
+cloth for "the White Man's fetish."
+
+ [Illustration: The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission.]
+
+My voyage up the Kasai ended at Dima, the headquarters of the Kasai
+Concession. I had been told that at Dima I would find a rubber
+plantation, and I had gone there to see it. I found that the
+plantation was four days distant, and that the boat for the
+plantation did not start for six days. I also had been told by the
+English missionaries at Dima, that I would find an American mission.
+When I reached Dima I learned that the American mission was at a
+station further up the river, which could not be reached sooner than
+a month. That is the sort of information upon which in the Congo
+one is forced to regulate his movements. As there was at Dima
+neither mission nor plantation, and as the only boat that would
+leave it in ten days was departing the next morning, I remained
+there only one night. It was a place cut out of the jungle, two
+hundred yards square, and of all stations I saw in the Congo, the
+best managed. It is the repair shop for the steamers belonging to
+the Kasai Concession, as well as the headquarters of the company and
+the residence of the director, M. Dryepoint. He and Van Damme seemed
+to be the most popular officials in the Congo. M. Dryepoint was up
+the river, so I did not meet him, but I was most courteously and
+hospitably entertained by M. Fumière. He gave me a whole house to
+myself, and personally showed me over his small kingdom. All the
+houses were of brick, and the paths and roads were covered with
+gravel and lined with flowers. Nothing in the Congo is more curious
+than this pretty town of suburban villas and orderly machine shops;
+with the muddy river for a street and the impenetrable jungle for a
+back yard. The home of the director at Dima is the proud boast of
+the entire Congo. And all they say of it is true. It did have a
+billiard table and ice, and a piano, and M. Fumière invited me to
+join his friends at an excellent dinner. In furnishing this
+celebrated house, the idea had apparently been to place in it the
+things one would least expect to find in the jungle, or, without
+wishing to be ungracious, anywhere. So, although there are no women
+at Dima, there are great mirrors in brass frames, chandeliers of
+glass with festoons and pendants of glass, metal lamps with shades
+of every color, painted plaster statuettes and carved silk-covered
+chairs. In the red glow of the lamps, surrounded by these Belgian
+atrocities, M. Fumière sat down to the pianola. The heat of Africa
+filled the room; on one side we could have touched the jungle, on
+the other in the river the hippopotamus puffed and snorted. M.
+Fumière pulled out the stops, and upon the heat and silence of the
+night, floated the "Evening Star," Mascagni's "Intermezzo," and
+"Chin-chin Chinaman."
+
+Next morning I left for Leopoldville in a boat much larger than the
+_Deliverance_, but with none of her cheer or good-fellowship. This
+boat was run by the black wife of the captain. Trailing her velvet
+gown, and cleaning her teeth with a stick of wood, she penetrated to
+every part of the steamer, making discipline impossible and driving
+the crew out of control.
+
+I was glad to escape at Kinchassa to the clean and homelike bungalow
+and beautiful gardens of the only Englishman still in the employ of
+the State, Mr. Cuthbert Malet, who gave me hospitably of his scanty
+store of "Scotch," and, what was even more of a sacrifice, of his
+precious handful of eggs. A week later I was again in Boma, waiting
+for the _Nigeria_ to take me back to Liverpool.
+
+Before returning to the West Coast and leaving the subject of the
+Congo, I wish to testify to what seemed to me the enormously
+important work that is being done by the missionaries. I am not
+always an admirer of the missionary. Some of those one meets in
+China and Japan seem to be taking much more interest in their own
+bodies than in the souls of others. But, in the Congo, almost the
+only people who are working in behalf of the natives are those
+attached to the missions. Because they bear witness against Leopold,
+much is said by his hired men and press agents against them. But
+they are deserving of great praise. Some of them are narrow and
+bigoted, and one could wish they were much more tolerant of their
+white brothers in exile, but compared with the good they do, these
+faults count for nothing. It is due to them that Europe and the
+United States know the truth about the Congo. They were the first to
+bear witness, and the hazardous work they still are doing for their
+fellow men is honest, practical Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+OLD CALABAR
+
+
+While I was up the Congo and the Kasai rivers, Mrs. Davis had
+remained at Boma, and when I rejoined her, we booked passage home on
+the _Nigeria_. We chose the _Nigeria_, which is an Elder-Dempster
+freight and passenger steamer, in preference to the fast mail
+steamer because of the ports of the West Coast we wished to see as
+many as possible. And, on her six weeks' voyage to Liverpool, the
+_Nigeria_ promised to spend as much time at anchor as at sea. On the
+Coast it is a more serious matter to reserve a cabin than in New
+York. You do not stop at an uptown office, and on a diagram of the
+ship's insides, as though you were playing roulette, point at a
+number. Instead, as you are to occupy your cabin, not for one, but
+for six, weeks, you search, as vigilantly as a navy officer looking
+for contraband, the ship herself and each cabin.
+
+But going aboard was a simple ceremony. The Hôtel Splendide stands
+on the bank of the Congo River. After saying "Good-by" to her
+proprietor, I walked to the edge of the water and waved my helmet.
+In the Congo, a white man standing in the sun without a hat is a
+spectacle sufficiently thrilling to excite the attention of all, and
+at once Captain Hughes of the _Nigeria_ sent a cargo boat to the
+rescue, and on the shoulders of naked Kroo boys Mrs. Davis and the
+maid, and the trunks, spears, tents, bathtubs, carved idols, native
+mats, and a live mongoos were dropped into it, and we were paddled
+to the gangway.
+
+"If that's all, we might as well get under way," said Captain
+Hughes. The anchor chains creaked, from the bank the proprietor of
+the Splendide waved his hand, and the long voyage to Liverpool had
+begun. It was as casual as halting and starting a cable-car.
+
+According to schedule, after leaving the Congo, we should have gone
+south and touched at Loanda. But on this voyage, outward bound, the
+_Nigeria_ had carried, to help build the railroad at Lobito Bay, a
+deckload of camels. They had proved trying passengers, and instead
+of first touching at the Congo, Captain Hughes had continued on
+south and put them ashore. So we were robbed of seeing both Loanda
+and the camels.
+
+This line, until Calabar is reached, carries but few passengers,
+and, except to receive cargo, the ship is not fully in commission.
+During this first week she is painted, and holystoned, her carpets
+are beaten, her cabins scrubbed and aired, and the passengers mess
+with the officers. So, of the ship's life, we acquired an intimate
+knowledge, her interests became our own, and the necessity of
+feeding her gaping holds with cargo was personal and acute. On a
+transatlantic steamer, when once the hatches are down, the captain
+need think only of navigation; on these coasters, the hatches never
+are down, and the captain, that sort of captain dear to the heart of
+the owners, is the man who fills the holds.
+
+A skipper going ashore to drum up trade was a novel spectacle.
+Imagine the captain of one of the Atlantic greyhounds prying among
+the warehouses on West Street, demanding of the merchants:
+"Anything going my way, this trip?" He would scorn to do it. Before
+his passengers have passed the custom officers, he is in mufti, and
+on his way to his villa on Brooklyn Heights, or to the Lambs Club,
+and until the Blue Peter is again at the fore, little he cares for
+passengers, mails, or cargo. But the captain of a "coaster" must be
+sailor and trader, too. He is expected to navigate a coast, the
+latest chart of which is dated somewhere near 1830, and at which the
+waves rush in walls of spray, sometimes as high as a three-story
+house. He must speak all the known languages of Europe, and all the
+unknown tongues of innumerable black brothers. At each port he must
+entertain out of his own pocket the agents of all the trading
+houses, and, in his head, he must keep the market price, "when laid
+down in Liverpool," of mahogany, copra, copal, rubber, palm oil, and
+ivory. To see that the agent has not overlooked a few bags of ground
+nuts, or a dozen puncheons of oil, he must go on shore and peer into
+the compound of each factory, and on board he must keep peace
+between the Kroo boys and the black deck passengers, and see that
+the white passengers with a temperature of 105, do not drink more
+than is good for them. At least, those are a few of the duties the
+captains on the ships controlled by Sir Alfred Jones, who is Elder
+and Dempster, are expected to perform. No wonder Sir Alfred is
+popular.
+
+Our first port of call was Landana, in Portuguese territory, but two
+ships of the Woermann Line were there ahead of us and had gobbled up
+all the freight. So we could but up anchor and proceed to
+Libreville, formerly the capital of the French Congo. At five in the
+morning by the light of a ship's lantern, we were paddled ashore to
+drum up trade. We found two traders, Ives and Thomas, who had
+waiting for the _Nigeria_ at the mouth of the Gabun River six
+hundred logs of mahogany, and, in consequence, there was general
+rejoicing, and Scotch and "sparklets," and even music from a German
+music-box that would burst into song only after it had been fed with
+a copper. One of the clerks said that Ives had forgotten how to
+extract the coppers and in consequence was using the music-box as a
+savings bank.
+
+In the French Congo the natives are permitted to trade; in the
+Congo Free State they are not, or, rather, they have nothing with
+which to trade, and the contrast between the empty "factories" of
+the Congo and those of Libreville, crowded with natives buying and
+selling, was remarkable. There also was a conspicuous difference in
+the quality and variety of the goods. In Leopold's Congo "trade"
+goods is a term of contempt. It describes articles manufactured only
+for those who have no choice and must accept whatever is offered.
+When your customers must take what you please to give them the
+quality of your goods is likely to deteriorate. Salt of the poorest
+grade, gaudy fabrics that neither "wear" nor "wash," bars of coarse
+soap (the native is continually washing his single strip of cloth),
+and axe-heads made of iron, are what Leopold thinks are a fair
+exchange for the forced labor of the black.
+
+But the articles I found in the factories in Libreville were what,
+in the Congo, are called "white man's goods" and were of excellent
+quality and in great variety. There were even French novels and
+cigars. Some of the latter, called the Young American on account of
+the name and the flag on the lid, tempted me, until I saw they were
+manufactured by Dusseldorffer and Vanderswassen, and one suspected
+Rotterdam.
+
+In Ives's factory I saw for the first time a "trade" rifle, or Tower
+musket. In the vernacular of the Coast, they are "gas-pipe" guns.
+They are put together in England, and to a white man are a most
+terrifying weapon. The original Tower muskets, such as, in the days
+of '76, were hung over the fireplace of the forefathers of the Sons
+of the Revolution, were manufactured in England, and stamped with
+the word "Tower," and for the reigning king G.R. I suppose at that
+date at the Tower of London there was an arsenal; but I am ready to
+be corrected. To-day the guns are manufactured at Birmingham, but
+they still have the flint lock, and still are stamped with the word
+"Tower" and the royal crown over the letters G.R., and with the
+arrow which is supposed to mark the property of the government. The
+barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore is that of an
+artesian well. The native fills four inches of this cavity with
+powder and the remaining three feet with rusty nails, barbed wire,
+leaden slugs, and the legs and broken parts of iron pots. An officer
+of the W.A.F.F.'s, in a fight in the bush in South Nigeria, had one
+of these things fired at him from a distance of fifteen feet. He
+told me all that saved him was that when the native pulled the
+trigger the recoil of the gun "kicked" the muzzle two feet in the
+air and the native ten feet into the bush. I bought a Tower rifle at
+the trade price, a pound, and brought it home. But although my
+friends have offered to back either end of the gun as being the more
+destructive, we have found no one with a sufficient sporting spirit
+to determine the point.
+
+Libreville is a very pretty town, but when it was laid out the
+surveyors just missed placing the Equator in its main street. It is
+easy to understand why with such a live wire in the vicinity
+Libreville is warm. From the same cause it also is rich in flowers,
+vines, and trees growing in generous, undisciplined abundance,
+making of Libreville one vast botanical garden, and burying the town
+and its bungalows under screens of green and branches of scarlet
+and purple flowers. Close to the surf runs an avenue bordered by
+giant cocoanut palms and, after the sun is down, this is the
+fashionable promenade. Here every evening may be seen in their
+freshest linen the six married white men of Libreville, and, in the
+latest Paris frocks, the six married ladies, while from the verandas
+of the factories that line the sea front and from under the paper
+lanterns of the Café Guion the clerks and traders sip their absinthe
+and play dominoes, and cast envious glances at the six fortunate
+fellow exiles.
+
+For several days we lay a few miles south of Libreville, off the
+mouth of the Gabun River, taking in the logs of mahogany. It was a
+continuous performance of the greatest interest. I still do not
+understand why all those engaged in it were not drowned, or pounded
+to a pulp. Just before we touched at the Gabun River, two tramp
+steamers, chartered by Americans, carried off a full cargo of this
+mahogany to the States. It was an experiment the result of which the
+traders of Libreville are awaiting with interest. The mahogany that
+the reader sees in America probably comes from Hayti, Cuba, or
+Belize, and is of much finer quality than that of the Gabun River,
+which latter is used for making what the trade calls "fancy"
+cigar-boxes and cheap furniture. But before it becomes a cigar-box
+it passes through many adventures. Weeks before the steamer arrives
+the trader, followed by his black boys, explores the jungle and
+blazes the trees. Then the boys cut trails through the forest, and,
+using logs for rollers, drag and push the tree trunks to the bank of
+the river. There the tree is cut into huge cubes, weighing about a
+ton, and measuring twelve to fifteen feet in length and three feet
+across each face. A boy can "shape" one of these logs in a day.
+
+Although his pay varies according to whether the tributaries of the
+river are full or low, so making the moving of the logs easy or
+difficult, he can earn about three pounds ten shillings a month,
+paid in cash. Compared with the eighty cents a month paid only a few
+miles away in the Congo Free State, and in "trade" goods, these are
+good wages. When the log is shaped the mark of the trader is branded
+on it with an iron, just as we brand cattle, and it is turned loose
+on the river. At the mouth of the river there is little danger of
+the log escaping, for the waves are stronger than the tide, and
+drive the logs upon the shore. There, in the surf, we found these
+tons of mahogany pounding against each other. In the ship's
+steam-launch were iron chains, a hundred yards long, to which, at
+intervals, were fastened "dogs," or spikes. These spikes were driven
+into the end of a log, the brand upon the log was noted by the
+captain and trader, and the logs, chained together like the vertebræ
+of a great sea serpent, were towed to the ship's side. There they
+were made fast, and three Kroo boys knocked the spike out of each
+log, warped a chain around it, and made fast that chain to the steel
+hawser of the winch. As it was drawn to the deck a Senegalese
+soldier, acting for the Customs, gave it a second blow with a
+branding hammer, and, thundering and smashing, it swung into the
+hold.
+
+ [Illustration: There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+ Pounding Against Each Other.]
+
+In the "round up" of the logs the star performers were the three
+Kroo boys at the ship's side. For days, in fascinated horror, the
+six passengers watched them, prayed for them, and made bets as to
+which would be the first to die. One understands that a Kroo boy is
+as much at home in the sea as on shore, but these boys were neither
+in the sea nor on shore. They were balancing themselves on blocks of
+slippery wood that weighed a ton, but which were hurled about by the
+great waves as though they were life-belts. All night the hammering
+of the logs made the ship echo like a monster drum, and all day
+without an instant's pause each log reared and pitched, spun like a
+barrel, dived like a porpoise, or, broadside, battered itself
+against the iron plates. But, no matter what tricks it played, a
+Kroo boy rode it as easily as though it were a horse in a
+merry-go-round.
+
+It was a wonderful exhibition. It furnished all the thrills that one
+gets when watching a cowboy on a bucking bronco, or a trained seal.
+Again and again a log, in wicked conspiracy with another log, would
+plan to entice a Kroo boy between them, and smash him. At the sight
+the passengers would shriek a warning, the boy would dive between
+the logs, and a mass of twelve hundred pounds of mahogany would
+crash against a mass weighing fifteen hundred with a report like
+colliding freight cars.
+
+And then, as, breathless, we waited to see what once was a Kroo boy
+float to the surface, he would appear sputtering and grinning, and
+saying to us as clearly as a Kroo smile can say it: "He never
+touched me!"
+
+ [Illustration: A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains.]
+
+Two days after we had stored away the mahogany we anchored off
+Duala, the capital of the German Cameroons. Duala is built upon a
+high cliff, and from the water the white and yellow buildings with
+many pillars gave it the appearance of a city. Instead, it is a
+clean, pretty town. With the German habit of order, it has been laid
+out like barracks, but with many gardens, well-kept, shaded streets,
+and high, cool houses, scientifically planned to meet the
+necessities of the tropics. At Duala the white traders and officials
+were plump and cheerful looking, and in the air there was more of
+prosperity than fever. The black and white sentry boxes and the
+native soldiers practising the stork march of the Kaiser's army were
+signs of a rigid military rule, but the signs of Germany's efforts
+in trade were more conspicuous. Nowhere on the coast did we see as
+at Duala such gorgeous offices as those of the great trading house
+of Woermann, the hated rivals of "Sir Alfred," such carved
+furniture, such shining brass railings, and nowhere else did we see
+plate-glass windows, in which, with unceasing wonder, the natives
+stared at reflections of their own persons. In the river there was a
+private dry dock of the Woermanns, and along the wharfs for acres
+was lumber for the Woermanns, boxes of trade goods, puncheons and
+casks for the Woermanns, private cooper shops and private machine
+shops and private banks for the Woermanns. The house flag of the
+Woermanns became as significant as that of a reigning sovereign. One
+felt inclined to salute it.
+
+The success of the German merchant on the East Coast and over all
+the world appears to be a question of character. He is patient,
+methodical, painstaking; it is his habit of industry that is helping
+him to close port after port to English, French, and American goods.
+The German clerks do not go to the East Coast or to China and South
+America to drink absinthe or whiskey, or to play dominoes or
+cricket. They work twice as long as do the other white men, and
+during those longer office hours they toil twice as hard. One of our
+passengers was a German agent returning for his vacation. I used to
+work in the smoking-room and he always was at the next table, also
+at work, on his ledgers and account books. He was so industrious
+that he bored me, and one day I asked him why, instead of spoiling
+his vacation with work, he had not balanced his books before he left
+the Coast.
+
+"It is an error," he said; "I can not find him." And he explained
+that in the record of his three years' stewardship, which he was to
+turn over to the directors in Berlin, there was somewhere a mistake
+of a sixpence.
+
+"But," I protested, "what's sixpence to you? You drink champagne all
+day. You begin at nine in the morning!"
+
+"I drink champagne," said the clerk, "because for three years I have
+myself alone in the bush lived, but, can I to my directors go with a
+book not balanced?" He laid his hand upon his heart and shook his
+head. "It is my heart that tells me 'No!'"
+
+After three weeks he gave a shout, his face blushed with pleasure,
+and actual tears were in his eyes. He had dug out the error, and at
+once he celebrated the recovery of the single sixpence by giving me
+twenty-four shillings' worth of champagne. It is a true story, and
+illustrates, I think, the training and method of the German mind, of
+the industry of the merchants who are trading over all the seas. As
+a rule the "trade" goods "made in Germany" are "shoddy." They do not
+compare in quality with those of England or the States; in every
+foreign port you will find that the English linen is the best, that
+the American agricultural implements, American hardware, saws, axes,
+machetes, are superior to those manufactured in any other country.
+But the German, though his goods are poorer, cuts the coat to please
+the customer. He studies the wishes of the man who is to pay. He is
+not the one who says: "Take it, or leave it."
+
+The agent of one of the largest English firms on the Ivory Coast,
+one that started by trading in slaves, said to me: "Our largest
+shipment to this coast is gin. This is a French colony, and if the
+French traders and I were patriots instead of merchants we would
+buy from our own people, but we buy from the Germans, because trade
+follows no flag. They make a gin out of potatoes colored with rum or
+gin, and label it 'Demerara' and 'Jamaica.' They sell it to us on
+the wharf at Antwerp for ninepence a gallon, and we sell it at nine
+francs per dozen bottles. Germany is taking our trade from us
+because she undersells us, and because her merchants don't wait for
+trade to come to them, but go after it. Before the Woermann boat is
+due their agent here will come to my factory and spy out all I have
+in my compound. 'Why don't you ship those logs with us?' he'll ask.
+
+"'Can't spare the boys to carry them to the beach,' I'll say.
+
+"'I'll furnish the boys,' he'll answer. That's the German way.
+
+"The Elder-Dempster boats lie three miles out at sea and blow a
+whistle at us. They act as though by carrying our freight they were
+doing us a favor. These German ships, to save you the long pull,
+anchor close to the beach and lend you their own shore boats and
+their own boys to work your cargo. And if you give them a few tons
+to carry, like as not they'll 'dash' you to a case of 'fizz.' And
+meanwhile the English captain is lying outside the bar tooting his
+whistle and wanting to know if you think he's going to run his ship
+aground for a few bags of rotten kernels. And he can't see, and the
+people at home can't see, why the Germans are crowding us off the
+Coast."
+
+Just outside of Duala, in the native village of Bell Town, is the
+palace and the harem of the ruler of the tribe that gave its name to
+the country, Mango Bell, King of the Cameroons. His brother, Prince
+William, sells photographs and "souvenirs." We bought photographs,
+and on the strength of that hinted at a presentation at court.
+Brother William seemed doubtful, so we bought enough postal cards to
+establish us as _étrangers de distinction_, and he sent up our
+names. With Pivani, Hatton & Cookson's chief clerk we were escorted
+to the royal presence. The palace is a fantastic, pagoda-like
+building of three stories; and furnished with many mirrors, carved
+oak sideboards, and lamp-shades of colored glass. Mango Bell, King
+of the Cameroons, sounds like a character in a comic opera, but the
+king was an extremely serious, tall, handsome, and self-respecting
+negro. Having been educated in England, he spoke much more correct
+English than any of us. Of the few "Kings I Have Met," both tame and
+wild, his manners were the most charming. Back of the palace is an
+enormously long building under one roof. Here live his thirty-five
+queens. To them we were not presented.
+
+ [Illustration: The Palace of the King of the Cameroons.]
+
+Prince William asked me if I knew where in America there was a
+street called Fifth Avenue. I suggested New York. He referred to a
+large Bible, and finding, much to his surprise, that my guess was
+correct, commissioned me to buy him, from a firm on that street,
+just such another Bible as the one in his hand. He forgot to give me
+the money to pay for it, but loaned us a half-dozen little princes
+to bear our purchases to the wharf. For this service their royal
+highnesses graciously condescended to receive a small "dash," and
+with the chief clerk were especially delighted. He, being a
+sleight-of-hand artist, apparently took five-franc pieces out of
+their Sunday clothes and from their kinky hair. When we left they
+were rapidly disrobing to find if any more five-franc pieces were
+concealed about their persons.
+
+The morning after we sailed from Duala we anchored in the river in
+front of Calabar, the capital of Southern Nigeria. Of all the ports
+at which we touched on the Coast, Calabar was the hottest, the best
+looking, and the best administered. It is a model colony, but to
+bring it to the state it now enjoys has cost sums of money entirely
+out of proportion to those the colony has earned. The money has been
+spent in cutting down the jungle, filling in swamps that breed
+mosquitoes and fever, and in laying out gravel walks, water mains,
+and open cement gutters, and in erecting model hospitals, barracks,
+and administrative offices. Even grass has been made to grow, and
+the high bluff upon which are situated the homes of the white
+officials and Government House has been trimmed and cultivated and
+tamed until it looks like an English park. It is a complete
+imitation, even to golf links and tennis courts. But the fight that
+has been made against the jungle has not stopped with golf links. In
+1896 the death rate was ten men out of every hundred. That
+corresponds to what in warfare is a decimating fire, upon which an
+officer, without danger of reproof, may withdraw his men. But at
+Calabar the English doctors did not withdraw, and now the death rate
+is as low as three out of every hundred. That Calabar, or any part
+of the West Coast, will ever be made entirely healthy is doubtful.
+Man can cut down a forest and fill in a swamp, but he can not reach
+up, as to a gas jet, and turn off the sun. And at Calabar, even at
+night when the sun has turned itself off, the humidity and the heat
+leave one sweating, tossing, and gasping for air. In Calabar the
+first thing a white man learns is not to take any liberties with the
+sun. When he dresses, eats, drinks, and moves about the sun is as
+constantly on his mind, as it is on the face of the sun-dial. The
+chief ascent to the top of the bluff where the white people live is
+up a steep cement walk about eighty yards long. At the foot of this
+a white man will be met by four hammock-bearers, and you will see
+him get into the hammock and be carried in it the eighty yards.
+
+For even that short distance he is taking no chances. But while he
+nurses his vitality and cares for his health he does not use the sun
+as an excuse for laziness or for slipshod work. I have never seen a
+place in the tropics where, in spite of the handicap of damp, fierce
+heat, the officers and civil officials are so keenly and constantly
+employed, where the bright work was so bright, and the whitewash so
+white.
+
+Out at the barracks of the West African Frontier Force, the
+W.A.F.F.'s, the officers, instead of from the shade of the veranda
+watching the non-coms. teach a native the manual, were themselves at
+work, and each was howling orders at the black recruits and smashing
+a gun against his hip and shoulder as smartly as a drill sergeant. I
+found the standard maintained at Calabar the more interesting
+because the men were almost entirely their own audience. If they
+make the place healthy, and attractive-looking, and dress for
+dinner, and shy at cocktails, and insist that their tan shoes shall
+glow like meershaum pipes, it is not because of the refining
+presence of lovely women, but because the men themselves like things
+that way. The men of Calabar have learned that when the sun is at
+110, morals, like material things, disintegrate, and that, though
+the temptation is to go about in bath-room slippers and pajamas, one
+is wiser to bolster up his drenched and drooping spirit with a stiff
+shirt front and a mess jacket. They tell that in a bush station in
+upper Nigeria, one officer got his D.S.O. because with an audience
+of only a white sergeant he persisted in a habit of shaving twice a
+day.
+
+ [Illustration: The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell.]
+
+There are very few women in Calabar. There are three or four who are
+wives of officials, two nurses employed by the government, and the
+Mother Superior and Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph, and, of
+course, all of them are great belles. For the Sisters, especially
+the officers, the government people, the traders, the natives, even
+the rival missionaries, have the most tremendous respect and
+admiration. The sacrifice of the woman who, to be near her husband
+on the Coast, consents to sicken and fade and grow old before her
+time, and of the nurse who, to preserve the health of others, risks
+her own, is very great; but the sacrifice of the Sisters, who have
+renounced all thought of home and husband, and who have exiled
+themselves to this steaming swamp-land, seems the most unselfish. In
+order to support the 150 little black boys and girls who are at
+school at the mission, the Sisters rob themselves of everything
+except the little that will keep them alive. Two, in addition to
+their work at the mission, act as nurses in the English hospital,
+and for that they receive together $600. This forms the sole regular
+income of the five women; for each $120 a year. With anything else
+that is given them in charity, they buy supplies for the little
+converts. They live in a house of sandstone and zinc that holds the
+heat like a flat-iron, they are obliged to wear a uniform that is of
+material and fashion so unsuited to the tropics that Dr. Chichester,
+in charge of the hospital, has written in protest against it to
+Rome, and on many days they fast, not because the Church bids them
+so to do, but because they have no food. And with it all, these five
+gentlewomen are always eager, cheerful, sweet of temper, and a
+living blessing to all who meet them. What now troubles them is that
+they have no room to accommodate the many young heathen who come to
+them to be taught to wear clothes, and to be good little boys and
+girls. This is causing the Sisters great distress. Any one who does
+not believe in that selfish theory, that charity begins at home, but
+who would like to help to spread Christianity in darkest Africa and
+give happiness to five noble women, who are giving their lives for
+others, should send a postal money order to Marie T. Martin, the
+Reverend Mother Superior of the Catholic Mission of Old Calabar,
+Southern Nigeria.
+
+And if you are going to do it, as they say in the advertising pages,
+"Do it now!"
+
+ [Illustration: The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+ Their Converts at Old Calabar.]
+
+At Calabar there is a royal prisoner, the King of Benin. He is not
+an agreeable king like His Majesty of the Cameroons, but a grossly
+fat, sensual-looking young man, who, a few years ago, when he was at
+war with the English, made "ju ju" against them by sacrificing three
+hundred maidens, his idea being that the ju ju would drive the
+English out of Benin. It was poor ju ju, for it drove the young man
+himself out of Benin, and now he is a king in exile. As far as I
+could see, the social position of the king is insecure, and
+certainly in Calabar he does not move in the first circles. One
+afternoon, when the four or five ladies of Calabar and Mr. Bedwell,
+the Acting Commissioner, and the officers of the W.A.F.F.'s were at
+the clubhouse having ice-drinks, the king at the head of a retinue
+of cabinet officers, high priests, and wives bore down upon the
+club-house with the evident intention of inviting himself to tea.
+Personally, I should like to have met a young man who could murder
+three hundred girls and worry over it so little that he had not lost
+one of his three hundred pounds, but the others were considerably
+annoyed and sent an A.D.C. to tell him to "Move on!" as though he
+were an organ-grinder, or a performing bear.
+
+"These kings," exclaimed a subaltern of the W.A.F.F.'s, indignantly,
+"are trying to push in everywhere!"
+
+When we departed from Calabar, the only thing that reconciled me to
+leaving it and its charming people, was the fact that when the ship
+moved there was a breeze. While at anchor in the river I had found
+that not being able to breathe by day or to sleep by night in time
+is trying, even to the stoutest constitution.
+
+One of the married ladies of Calabar, her husband, an officer of
+the W.A.F.F.'s, and the captain of the police sailed on the
+_Nigeria_ "on leave," and all Calabar came down to do them honor.
+There was the commissioner's gig, and the marine captain's gig, and
+the police captain's gig, and the gig from "Matilda's," the English
+trading house, and one from the Dutch house and the French house,
+and each gig was manned by black boys in beautiful uniforms and
+fezzes, and each crew fought to tie up to the foot of the
+accommodation ladder. It was as gay as a regatta. On the
+quarter-deck the officers drank champagne, in the captain's cabin
+Hughes treated the traders to beer, in the "square" the non-coms. of
+the W.A.F.F.'s drank ale. The men who were going away on leave tried
+not to look too happy, and those who were going back to the shore
+drank deep and tried not to appear too carelessly gay. A billet on
+the West Coast is regarded by the man who accepts it as a sort of
+sporting proposition, as a game of three innings of nine months
+each, during which he matches his health against the Coast. If he
+lives he wins; if he dies the Coast wins.
+
+After Calabar, at each port off which we anchored, at Ponny,
+Focardos, Lagos, Accra, Cape Coast Castle, and Sekonni, it was
+always the same. Always there came over the side the man going
+"Home," the man who had fought with the Coast and won. He was as
+excited, as jubilant as a prisoner sentenced to death who had
+escaped his executioners. And always the heartiest in their
+congratulations were the men who were left behind, his brother
+officers, or his fellow traders, the men of the Sun Hat Brigade, in
+their unofficial uniforms, in shirtwaists, broad belts from which
+dangled keys and a whistle, beautifully polished tan boots, and with
+a wand-like whip or stick of elephant hide. They swarmed the decks
+and overwhelmed the escaping refugee with good wishes. He had
+cheated their common enemy. By merely keeping alive he had achieved
+a glorious victory. In their eyes he had performed a feat of
+endurance like swimming the English Channel. They crowded to
+congratulate him as people at the pit-mouth congratulate the
+entombed miner, who, after many days of breathing noisome gases,
+drinks the pure air. Even the black boys seem to feel the triumph
+of the white master, and their paddles never flashed so bravely, and
+their songs never rang so wildly, as when they were racing him away
+from the brooding Coast with its poisonous vapors toward the big
+white ship that meant health and home.
+
+Although most of the ports we saw only from across a mile or two of
+breakers, they always sent us something of interest. Sometimes all
+the male passengers came on board drunk. With the miners of the Gold
+Coast and the "Palm Oil Ruffians" it used to be a matter of
+etiquette not to leave the Coast in any other condition. Not so to
+celebrate your escape seemed ungenerous and ungrateful. At Sekondi
+one of the miners from Ashanti was so completely drunk, that he was
+swung over the side, tied up like a plum-pudding, in a bag.
+
+When he emerged from the bag his expression of polite inquiry was
+one with which all could sympathize. To lose consciousness on the
+veranda of a café, and awake with a bump on the deck of a steamer
+many miles at sea, must strengthen one's belief in magic carpets.
+
+Another entertainment for the white passengers was when the boat
+boys fought for the black passengers as they were lowered in the
+mammy-chair. As a rule, in the boats from shore, there were twelve
+boys to paddle and three or four extra men to handle and unhook the
+mammy-chair and the luggage. While the boys with the paddles
+manoeuvred to bring their boat next to the ship's side, the extra
+boys tried to pull their rivals overboard, dragging their hands from
+ropes and gunwales, and beating them with paddles. They did this
+while every second the boat under them was spinning in the air or
+diving ten feet into the hollow of the waves, and trying to smash
+itself and every other boat into driftwood. From the deck the second
+officer would swing a mammy-chair over the side with the idea of
+dropping it into one of these boats. But before the chair could be
+lowered, a rival boat would shove the first one away, and with a
+third boat would be fighting for its place. Meanwhile, high above
+the angry sea, the chair and its cargo of black women would be
+twirling like a weathercock and banging against the ship's side. The
+mammies were too terrified to scream, but the ship's officers
+yelled and swore, the boat's crews shrieked, and the black babies
+howled. Each baby was strapped between the shoulders of the mother.
+A mammy-chair is like one of those two-seated swings in which people
+sit facing one another. If to the shoulders of each person in the
+swing was tied a baby, it is obvious that should the swing bump into
+anything, the baby would get the worst of it. That is what happened
+in the mammy-chair. Every time the chair spun around, the head of a
+baby would come "crack!" against the ship's side. So the babies
+howled, and no one of the ship's passengers, crowded six deep along
+the rail, blamed them. The skull of the Ethiopian may be hard, but
+it is most unfair to be swathed like a mummy so that you can neither
+kick nor strike back, and then have your head battered against a
+five-thousand-ton ship.
+
+How the boys who paddled the shore boats live long enough to learn
+how to handle them is a great puzzle. We were told that the method
+was to take out one green boy with a crew of eleven experts. But how
+did the original eleven become experts? At Accra, where the waves
+are very high and rough, are the best boat boys on the coast. We
+watched the Custom House boat fight her way across the two miles of
+surf to the shore. The fight lasted two hours. It was as thrilling
+as watching a man cross Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. The greater
+part of the two hours the boat stood straight in the air, as though
+it meant to shake the crew into the sea, and the rest of the time it
+ran between walls of water ten feet high and was entirely lost to
+sight. Two things about the paddling on the West Coast make it
+peculiar; the boys sit, not on the thwarts, but on the gunwales, as
+a woman rides a side-saddle, and in many parts of the coast the boys
+use paddles shaped like a fork or a trident. One asks how, sitting
+as they do, they are able to brace themselves, and how with their
+forked paddles they obtained sufficient resistance. A coaster's
+explanation of the split paddle was that the boys did not want any
+more resistance than they could prevent.
+
+ [Illustration: The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+ Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle.]
+
+There is no more royal manner of progress than when one of these
+boats lifts you over the waves, with the boys chanting some wild
+chorus, with their bare bodies glistening, their teeth and eyes
+shining, the splendid muscles straining, and the dripping paddles
+flashing like twelve mirrors.
+
+Some of the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power,
+and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in
+unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a
+sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to the
+newly rich.
+
+I knew I had left the West Coast when, the very night we sailed from
+Sierra Leone, for greater comfort, I reached for a linen bed-spread
+that during four stifling, reeking weeks had lain undisturbed at the
+foot of the berth. During that time I had hated it as a monstrous
+thing; as something as hot and heavy as a red flannel blanket, as a
+buffalo robe. And when, on the following night, I found the
+wind-screen was not in the air port, and that, nevertheless, I still
+was alive, I knew we had passed out of reach of the Equator, and
+that all that followed would be as conventional as the "trippers"
+who joined us at the Canary Isles; and as familiar as the low, gray
+skies, the green, rain-soaked hills, and the complaining Channel
+gulls that convoyed us into Plymouth Harbor.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+ALONG THE EAST COAST
+
+
+Were a man picked up on a flying carpet and dropped without warning
+into Lorenço Marquez, he might guess for a day before he could make
+up his mind where he was, or determine to which nation the place
+belonged.
+
+If he argued from the adobe houses with red-tiled roofs and walls of
+cobalt blue, the palms, and the yellow custom-house, he might think
+he was in Santiago; the Indian merchants in velvet and gold
+embroideries seated in deep, dark shops which breathe out dry,
+pungent odors, might take him back to Bombay; the Soudanese and
+Egyptians in long blue night-gowns and freshly ironed fezzes would
+remind him of Cairo; the dwarfish Portuguese soldiers, of Madeira,
+Lisbon, and Madrid, and the black, bare-legged policemen in khaki
+with great numerals on their chests, of Benin, Sierra Leone, or
+Zanzibar. After he had noted these and the German, French, and
+English merchants in white duck, and the Dutch man-of-warsmen, who
+look like ship's stewards, the French marines in coal-scuttle
+helmets, the British Jack-tars in their bare feet, and the native
+Kaffir women, each wrapped in a single, gorgeous shawl with a black
+baby peering from beneath her shoulder-blades, he would decide, by
+using the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, that he was in the
+Midway of the Chicago Fair.
+
+Several hundred years ago Da Gama sailed into Delagoa Bay and
+founded the town of Lorenço Marquez, and since that time the
+Portuguese have always felt that it is only due to him and to
+themselves to remain there. They have great pride of race, and they
+like the fact that they possess and govern a colony. So, up to the
+present time, in spite of many temptations to dispose of it, they
+have made the ownership of Delagoa Bay an article of their national
+religion. But their national religion does not require of them to
+improve their property. And to-day it is much as it was when the
+sails of Da Gama's fleet first stirred its poisonous vapors.
+
+The harbor itself is an excellent one and the bay is twenty-two
+miles along, but there is only one landing-pier, and that such a
+pier as would be considered inconsistent with the dignity of the
+Larchmont Yacht Club. To the town itself Portugal has been content
+to contribute as her share the gatherers of taxes, collectors of
+customs and dispensers of official seals. She is indifferent to the
+fact that the bulk of general merchandise, wine, and machinery that
+enter her port is brought there by foreigners. She only demands that
+they buy her stamps. Her importance in her own colony is that of a
+toll-gate at the entrance of a great city.
+
+Lorenço Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home.
+When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen
+a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried
+hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months,
+the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were
+robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about one of the
+twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and
+unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of
+Lorenço Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and
+selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous
+of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its
+patrons that "Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests
+will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by
+the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the
+"tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had
+found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat
+difficult.
+
+On her way from Lorenço Marquez to Beira our ship, the _Kanzlar_,
+kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow
+sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of
+outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue
+mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great
+inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern
+coast and against which the waves break with a report like the
+bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and
+the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills
+accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw
+Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four
+stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the
+summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the
+sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the
+lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were
+more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It
+suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the
+board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her
+Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing
+except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this
+should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the
+Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and
+instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt
+were only opened for the summer season and which for the rest of
+the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial
+gales. Beira need only to have added to her "Sea-View" and "Beach"
+hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type
+artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home.
+Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and
+Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and
+Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many
+ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were
+moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Lorenço
+Marquez, was brisk, busy, and clean. Although both are ostensibly
+Portuguese, Beira is to Lorenço Marquez what the cleanest street of
+Greenwich Village, of New York City, is to "Hell's Kitchen" and the
+Chinese Quarter. The houses were well swept and cool, the shops were
+alluring, the streets were of clean shifting white sand, and the
+sidewalks, of gray cement, were as well kept as a Philadelphia
+doorstep. The most curious feature of Beira is her private tram-car
+system. These cars run on tiny tracks which rise out of the sand
+and extend from one end of the town to the other, with branch lines
+running into the yards of shops and private houses. The motive power
+for these cars is supplied by black boys who run behind and push
+them. Their trucks are about half as large as those on the hand-cars
+we see flying along our railroad tracks at home, worked by gangs of
+Italian laborers. On some of the trucks there is only a bench,
+others are shaded by awnings, and a few have carriage-lamps and
+cushioned seats and carpets. Each of them is a private conveyance;
+there is not one which can be hired by the public. When a merchant
+wishes to go down town to the port, his black boys carry his private
+tram-car from his garden and settle it on the rails, the merchant
+seats himself, and the boys push him and his baby-carriage to
+whatever part of the city he wishes to go. When his wife is out
+shopping and stops at a store the boys lift her car into the sand in
+order to make a clear track for any other car which may be coming
+behind them. One would naturally suppose that with the tracks and
+switch-boards and sidings already laid, the next step would be to
+place cars upon them for the convenience of the public, but this is
+not the case, and the tracks through the city are jealously reserved
+for the individuals who tax themselves five pounds a year to extend
+them and to keep them in repair. After the sleds on the island of
+Madeira these private street-cars of Beira struck me as being the
+most curious form of conveyance I had ever seen.
+
+ [Illustration: Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira.]
+
+Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of
+feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some
+of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of
+Cape Town and Durban. But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on
+the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company's possessions,
+and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was
+necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build
+a railroad through the swamp and jungle. This road is now in
+operation. It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the
+brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress
+through the marshes, two hundred of the men working on it died of
+fever. Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the
+Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the
+Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police. How this
+was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied,
+Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of "Judson and the
+Empire." It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored
+it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat. A
+week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all
+the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had
+made no mention of the fact. The result was that the _Kanzlar_ was
+hung up for twenty-four hours. We tried to comfort ourselves by
+thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which
+had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of
+empire.
+
+The _Kanzlar_ could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the
+_Adjutant_, which belongs to the same line and which was created for
+these shallow waters, came to the _Kanzlar_, bringing Chinde with
+her. She brought every white man in the port, and those who could
+not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the _Adjutant_,
+clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed
+high above us. For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as
+though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that
+brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the
+pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the _Adjutant_, in white
+duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of
+Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower
+deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as
+Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and
+gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new
+leather cases. From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and
+from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in
+fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian
+coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound
+and unwound long blue strips of cotton about their shoulders, or
+ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading
+required. Among these strange peoples were goats, as delicately
+colored as a meerschaum pipe, and with the horns of our red deer,
+strange white oxen with humps behind the shoulders, those that are
+exhibited in cages at home as "sacred buffalo," but which here are
+only patient beasts of burden, and gray monkeys, wildcats, snakes
+and crocodiles in cages addressed to "Hagenbeck, Hamburg." The
+freight was no less curious; assegais in bundles, horns stretching
+for three feet from point to point, or rising straight, like
+poignards; skins, ground-nuts, rubber, and heavy blocks of bees-wax
+wrapped in coarse brown sacking, and which in time will burn before
+the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Italy, Spain, and France.
+
+People of the "Bromide" class who run across a friend from their own
+city in Paris will say, "Well, to think of meeting _you_ here. How
+small the world is after all!" If they wish a better proof of how
+really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the
+existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports twenty stores in
+Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not
+the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man
+who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the
+latitudes together and made the world the small department store it
+is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.
+
+The explorer tells you, "I was the first man to climb Kilamajaro."
+"I was the first to cut a path from the shores of Lake Nyassa into
+the Congo Basin." He even lectures about it, in front of a wet sheet
+in the light of a stereopticon, and because he has added some miles
+of territory to the known world, people buy his books and learned
+societies place initials after his distinguished name. But before
+his grandfather was born and long before he ever disturbed the
+waters of Nyassa the Phoenicians and Arabs and Portuguese and men
+of his own time and race had been there before him to buy ivory,
+both white and black, to exchange beads and brass bars and
+shaving-mirrors for the tusks of elephants, raw gold, copra, rubber,
+and the feathers of the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a
+study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its
+way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in
+consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts
+which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But
+that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear
+at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders,
+backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast
+of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships
+faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire
+Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre
+Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being
+planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want
+tires for their automobiles; and because the fashionable ornament of
+the natives of Swaziland is, for no reason, no longer blue-glass
+beads, manufacturers of beads in Switzerland and Italy find
+themselves out of pocket by some thousands and thousands of pounds.
+
+The traders who were making the world smaller by bringing cotton
+prints to Chinde to cover her black nakedness, her British Majesty's
+consul at that port, and the boy lieutenant of the paddle-wheeled
+gunboat which patrols the Zambesi River, were the gentlemen who
+informed me that they were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom
+the _Kanzlar_ might have picked up from a desert island, where they
+had been marooned and left to rot. They observed the gilded glory of
+the _Kanzlar_ smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables,
+with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all
+the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus.
+The boy-commander of the gunboat gazed at white women in the saloon
+with fascinated admiration.
+
+"I have never," he declared, breathlessly, "I have never seen so
+many beautiful women in one place at the same time! I'd forgotten
+that there were so many white people in the world."
+
+"If I stay on board this ship another minute I shall go home," said
+Her Majesty's consul, firmly. "You will have to hold me. It's coming
+over me--I feel it coming. I shall never have the strength to go
+back." He appealed to the sympathetic lieutenant. "Let's desert
+together," he begged.
+
+ [Illustration: One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+ Mozambique.]
+
+In the swamps of the East Coast the white exiles lay aside the
+cloaks and masks of crowded cities. They do not try to conceal their
+feelings, their vices, or their longings. They talk to the first
+white stranger they meet of things which in the great cities a man
+conceals even from his room-mate, and men they would not care to
+know, and whom they would never meet in the fixed social pathways of
+civilization, they take to their hearts as friends. They are too few
+to be particular, they have no choice, and they ask no questions. It
+is enough that the white man, like themselves, is condemned to
+exile. They do not try to find solace in the thought that they are
+the "foretrekkers" of civilization, or take credit to themselves
+because they are the path-finders and the pioneers who bear the heat
+and burden of the day. They are sorry for themselves, because they
+know, more keenly than any outsider can know, how good is the life
+they have given up, and how hard is the one they follow, but they do
+not ask anyone else to be sorry. They would be very much surprised
+if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and
+Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good
+and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.
+
+On the day they boarded the _Kanzlar_ the pains of nostalgia were
+sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves
+of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own
+condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck,
+as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even
+boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess,
+who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.
+
+A little English boy ran through the smoking-room, and they fell
+upon him, and quarrelled for the privilege of holding him on their
+knees. He was a shy, coquettish little English boy, and the
+boisterous, noisy men did not appeal to him. To them he meant home
+and family and the old nursery, papered with colored pictures from
+the Christmas _Graphic_. His stout, bare legs and tangled curls and
+sailor's hat, with "H.M.S. Mars" across it, meant all that was clean
+and sweet-smelling in their past lives.
+
+"I'll arrest you for a deserter," said the lieutenant of the
+gunboat. "I'll make the consul send you back to the _Mars_." He held
+the boy on his knee fearfully, handling him as though he were some
+delicate and precious treasure that might break if he dropped it.
+
+The agent of the Oceanic Development Company, Limited, whose
+business in life is to drive savage Angonis out of the jungle, where
+he hopes in time to see the busy haunts of trade, begged for the boy
+with eloquent pleading.
+
+"You've had the kiddie long enough now," he urged. "Let me have him.
+Come here, Mr. Mars, and sit beside me, and I'll give you fizzy
+water--like lemon-squash, only nicer." He held out a wet bottle of
+champagne alluringly.
+
+"No, he is coming to his consul," that youth declared. "He's coming
+to his consul for protection. You are not fit characters to
+associate with an innocent child. Come to me, little boy, and do not
+listen to those degraded persons." So the "innocent child" seated
+himself between the consul and the chartered trader, and they patted
+his fat calves and red curls and took his minute hands in their
+tanned fists, eying him hungrily, like two cannibals. But the little
+boy was quite unconscious and inconsiderate of their hunger, and,
+with the cruelty of children, pulled himself free and ran away.
+
+"He was such a nice little kiddie," they said, apologetically, as
+though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.
+
+"I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years,"
+said the lieutenant, genially. "But fancy your knowing Sparks! He
+has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and
+he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the
+lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's
+where we hit it off--we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I
+suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down
+here. I know Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to
+talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks
+has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred
+miles."
+
+I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely
+that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and
+spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the
+second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized
+a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were
+sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving
+themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a "disgusting
+practice," and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the
+lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.
+
+"Yes," he said; "and what's worse is that we're here for two years
+more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China.
+Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old,
+and the steamer stops once every month."
+
+ [Illustration: Custom House, Zanzibar.]
+
+Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side,
+so we had time in which to give the exiles the news of the outside
+world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one
+as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy;
+how another had sold "ready to wear" clothes in a New York
+department store, and another had been attaché at Madrid, and
+another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We
+exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would
+meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many
+bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect
+the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.
+
+But at last the ship's whistle blew with raucous persistence. It was
+final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which
+once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages,
+of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and
+flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the
+mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the
+_Kanzlar_ became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon
+line.
+
+I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them
+until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to
+borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with
+never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean
+land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty
+group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was
+more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall
+never meet them again--we had just burned signals as our ships
+passed in the night--and yet, I must always consider among the
+friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways
+straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi,
+"the only respectable members of Chinde Society."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: NOTE--I did not lose the white-clad youths. The
+lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a
+consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde
+newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also,
+should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.
+He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the
+_Kanzlar_, alone prevented his social position being publicly
+recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though
+tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society. R.H.D.]
+
+The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his
+contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one
+which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its
+inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown
+jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the
+captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down
+with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the
+slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the
+casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the
+sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the
+shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the
+harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by
+the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of
+the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom
+this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of
+honor.
+
+ [Illustration: Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar.]
+
+Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great
+slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who
+fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a
+fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison
+and all the inhabitants as well. To-day the slave-trade brings to
+those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but
+the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain,
+and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and
+red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been
+so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has
+taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The
+streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their
+silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day,
+which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no
+footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs.
+The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares
+to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no
+carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and
+refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the
+city, and with the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only
+wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.
+
+I have never visited a city which so impressed one with the fact
+that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred
+years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is,
+on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with
+dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving
+above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city
+of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as
+letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and
+the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy
+curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers
+of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along
+the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great
+blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated
+checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are
+palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and
+churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard
+the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the
+churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty
+stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the
+actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the
+fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous
+period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers,"
+and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within
+its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery,
+when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and
+the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the
+market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of
+bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves
+bought and sold.
+
+In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of
+East Africa from south of Lorenço Marquez to north of Mozambique,
+and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog
+in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to
+help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he
+keeps those who would improve both from gaining any hold or
+influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East
+Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now
+surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack
+of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the
+country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side.
+They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely
+lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats
+they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new
+territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars
+them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth
+undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his café at the coast
+and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the
+native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and
+the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to
+cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them
+no protection.
+
+The land back of Mozambique is divided into "holdings," and the rent
+of each holding is based upon the number of native huts it
+contains. The tax per hut is one pound a year, and these holdings
+are leased to any Portuguese who promises to pay the combined taxes
+of all the huts. He also engages to cut new roads, to keep those
+already made in repair, and to furnish a sufficient number of police
+to maintain order. The lessees of these holdings have given rise to
+many and terrible scandals. In the majority of cases, the lessee,
+once out of reach of all authority and of public opinion, and
+wielding the power of life and death, becomes a tyrant and
+task-master over his district, taxing the natives to five and ten
+times the amount which each is supposed to furnish, and treating
+them virtually as his bondsmen. Up along the Shire River, the
+lessees punish the blacks by hanging them from a tree by their
+ankles and beating their bare backs with rhinoceros hide, until, as
+it has been described to me by a reputable English resident, the
+blood runs in a stream over the negro's shoulders, and forms a pool
+beneath his eyes.
+
+ [Illustration: The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking,
+ Is Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A.]
+
+You hear of no legitimate enterprise fostered by these lessees, of
+no development of natural resources, but, instead, you are told
+tales of sickening cruelty, and you can read in the consular
+reports others quite as true; records of heartless treatment of
+natives, of neglect of great resources, and of hurried snatching at
+the year's crop and a return to the Coast, with nothing to show of
+sustained effort or steady development. The incompetence of Portugal
+cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the
+Boer, she will find the seaport of Lorenço Marquez too necessary to
+her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the
+Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the
+Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African
+Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to
+make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It
+seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little
+kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to
+benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she will
+withdraw from it, in favor of those who are fitter to survive her.
+
+There is no more interesting contrast along the coast of East
+Africa than that presented by the colonies of England, Germany, and
+Portugal. Of these three, the colonies of the Englishmen are, as one
+expects to find them, the healthiest, the busiest, and the most
+prosperous. They thrive under your very eyes; you feel that they
+were established where they are, not by accident, not to gratify a
+national vanity or a ruler's ambition, but with foresight and with
+knowledge, and with the determination to make money; and that they
+will increase and flourish because they are situated where the
+natives and settlers have something to sell, and where the men can
+bring, in return, something the natives and colonials wish to buy.
+Port Elizabeth, Durban, East London, and Zanzibar belong to this
+prosperous class, which gives good reason for the faith of those who
+founded them.
+
+On the other hand, as opposed to these, there are the settlements of
+the Portuguese, rotten and corrupt, and the German settlements of
+Dar Es Salaam and Tanga which have still to prove their right to
+exist. Outwardly, to the eye, they are model settlements. Dar Es
+Salaam, in particular, is a beautiful and perfectly appointed
+colonial town. In the care in which it is laid out, in the
+excellence of its sanitary arrangements, in its cleanliness, and in
+the magnificence of its innumerable official residences, and in
+their sensible adaptability to the needs of the climate, one might
+be deceived into believing that Dar Es Salaam is the beautiful
+gateway of a thriving and busy colony. But there are no ramparts of
+merchandise along her wharves, no bulwarks of strangely scented
+bales blocking her water-front; no lighters push hurriedly from the
+shore to meet the ship, although she is a German ship, or to receive
+her cargo of articles "made in Germany." On the contrary, her
+freight is unloaded at the English ports, and taken on at English
+ports. And the German traders who send their merchandise to Hamburg
+in her hold come over the side at Zanzibar, at Durban, and at Aden,
+where the English merchants find in them fierce competitors. There
+is nothing which goes so far to prove the falsity of the saying that
+"trade follows the flag" as do these model German colonies with
+their barracks, governor's palace, officers' clubs, public pleasure
+parks, and with no trade; and the English colonies, where the German
+merchants remain, and where, under the English flag, they grow
+steadily rich. The German Emperor, believing that colonies are a
+source of strength to an empire, rather than the weakness that they
+are, has raised the German flag in Central East Africa, but the
+ships of the German East African Company, subsidized by him, carry
+their merchandize to the English ports, and his German subjects
+remain where they can make the most money. They do not move to those
+ports where the flag of their country would wave over them.
+
+Dar Es Salaam, although it lacks the one thing needful to make it a
+model settlement, possesses all the other things which are needful,
+and many which are pure luxuries. Its residences, as I have said,
+have been built after the most approved scientific principles of
+ventilation and sanitation. In no tropical country have I seen
+buildings so admirably adapted to the heat and climatic changes and
+at the same time more in keeping with the surrounding scenery. They
+are handsome, cool-looking, white and clean, with broad verandas,
+high walls, and false roofs under which currents of air are lured in
+spite of themselves. The residences are set back along the high bank
+which faces the bay. In front of them is a public promenade, newly
+planted shade-trees arch over it, and royal palms reach up to it
+from the very waters of the harbor. At one end of this semicircle
+are the barracks of the Soudanese soldiers, and at the other is the
+official palace of the governor. Everything in the settlement is
+new, and everything is built on the scale of a city, and with the
+idea of accommodating a great number of people. Hotels and cafés,
+better than any one finds in the older settlements along the coast,
+are arranged on the water-front, and there is a church capable of
+seating the entire white population at one time. If the place is to
+grow, it can do so only through trade, and when trade really comes
+all these palaces and cafés and barracks which occupy the entire
+water-front will have to be pushed back to make way for warehouses
+and custom-house sheds. At present it is populated only by
+officials, and, I believe, twelve white women.
+
+ [Illustration: The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage.]
+
+You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a
+box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this
+beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and
+emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at
+a world's fair as an example of a model village.
+
+In writing of Zanzibar I am embarrassed by the knowledge that I am
+not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first
+sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage
+out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me
+made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.
+
+Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of
+high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand
+at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the
+people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run
+ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass
+of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty
+fortress-like façade before you, and a strip of white sand is at
+your feet.
+
+And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind
+resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack
+in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls
+where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak,
+and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.
+
+In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous,
+unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework,
+windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of
+the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue,
+and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and
+the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East
+African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering
+walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either
+actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and
+glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him;
+the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their
+children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and
+bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you
+with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare
+shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows
+dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long
+and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of
+richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces
+of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts,
+and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of
+the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it
+is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.
+
+The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think
+Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in
+your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a
+vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of
+Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it
+healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection
+for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm
+government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of
+this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb
+of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous
+life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but
+they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at
+all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does
+in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in
+Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers
+alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so
+infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for
+those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly
+for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.
+
+ [Illustration: H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan
+ of Zanzibar.]
+
+Zanzibar is an "Arabian Nights" city, a comic-opera capital, a most
+difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any
+house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and
+decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel
+sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe
+walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a
+carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing
+will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that
+the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the
+next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will
+prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.
+
+Several hundred years ago the Sultans of Zanzibar grew powerful and
+wealthy through exporting slaves and ivory from the mainland. These
+were not two separate industries, but one was developed by the other
+and was dependent upon it. The procedure was brutally simple. A
+slave-trader, having first paid his tribute to the Sultan, crossed
+to the mainland, and marching into the interior made his bargain
+with one of the local chiefs for so much ivory, and for so many men
+to carry it down to the coast. Without some such means of transport
+there could have been no bargain, so the chief who was anxious to
+sell would select a village which had not paid him the taxes due
+him, and bid the trader help himself to what men he found there.
+Then would follow a hideous night attack, a massacre of women and
+children, and the taking prisoners of all able-bodied males. These
+men, chained together in long lines, and each bearing a heavy tooth
+of ivory upon his shoulder, would be whipped down to the coast. It
+was only when they had carried the ivory there, and their work was
+finished, that the idea presented itself of selling them as well as
+the ivory. Later, these bearers became of equal value with the
+ivory, and the raiding of native villages and the capture of men and
+women to be sold into slavery developed into a great industry. The
+industry continues fitfully to-day, but it is carried on under great
+difficulties, and at a risk of heavy punishments. What is called
+"domestic slavery" is recognized on the island of Zanzibar, the vast
+clove plantations which lie back of the port employing many hundreds
+of these domestic slaves. It is not to free these from their slight
+bondage that the efforts of those who are trying to suppress the
+slave-trade is to-day directed, but to prevent others from being
+added to their number. What slave-trading there is at present is by
+Arabs and Indians. They convey the slaves in dhows from the mainland
+to Madagascar, Arabia, or southern Persia, and to the Island of
+Pemba, which lies north of Zanzibar, and only fifteen miles from the
+mainland. If a slave can be brought this short distance in safety he
+can be sold for five hundred dollars; on the mainland he is not
+worth more than fifteen dollars. The channels, and the mouths of
+rivers, and the little bays opening from the Island of Pemba are
+patrolled more or less regularly by British gunboats, and junior
+officers in charge of a cutter and a crew of half a dozen men, are
+detached from these for a few months at a time on "boat service." It
+seems to be an unprofitable pursuit, for one officer told me that
+during his month of boat service he had boarded and searched three
+hundred dhows, which is an average of ten a day, and found slaves on
+only one of them. But as, on this occasion, he rescued four slaves,
+and the slavers, moreover, showed fight, and wounded him and two of
+his boat's crew, he was more than satisfied.
+
+The trade in ivory, which has none of these restrictions upon it,
+still flourishes, and the cool, dark warerooms of Zanzibar are
+stored high with it. In a corner of one little cellar they showed
+us twenty-five thousand dollars worth of these tusks piled up as
+carelessly as though they were logs in a wood-shed. One of the most
+curious sights in Zanzibar is a line of Zanzibari boys, each
+balancing a great tusk on his shoulder, worth from five hundred to
+two thousand dollars, and which is unprotected except for a piece of
+coarse sacking.
+
+ [Illustration: A German "Factory" at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+ Living Apartments Above.]
+
+The largest exporters of ivory in the world are at Zanzibar, and
+though probably few people know it, the firm which carries on this
+business belongs to New York City, and has been in the ivory trade
+with India and Africa from as far back as the fifties. In their
+house at Zanzibar they have entertained every distinguished African
+explorer, and the stories its walls have heard of native wars,
+pirate dhows, slave-dealers, the English occupation, and terrible
+marches through the jungles of the Congo, would make valuable and
+picturesque history. The firm has always held a semi-official
+position, for the reason that the United States Consul at Zanzibar,
+who should speak at least Swahili and Portuguese, is invariably
+chosen for the post from a drug-store in Yankton, Dakota, or a
+post-office in Canton, Ohio. Consequently, on arriving at Zanzibar
+he becomes homesick, and his first official act is to cable his
+resignation, and the State Department instructs whoever happens to
+be general manager of the ivory house to perform the duties of
+acting-consul. So, the ivory house has nearly always held the eagle
+of the consulate over its doorway. The manager of the ivory house,
+who at the time of our visit was also consul, is Harris Robbins
+Childs. Mr. Childs is well known in New York City, is a member of
+many clubs there, and speaks at least five languages. He understands
+the native tongue of Zanzibar so well that when the Prime Minister
+of the Sultan took us to the palace to pay our respects, Childs
+talked the language so much better than did the Sultan's own Prime
+Minister that there was in consequence much joking and laughing. The
+Sultan then was a most dignified, intelligent, and charming old
+gentleman. He was popular both with his own people, who loved him
+with a religious fervor, and with the English, who unobtrusively
+conducted his affairs.
+
+There have been sultans who have acted less wisely than does Hamud
+bin Muhamad bin Said. A few years ago one of these, Said Khaled,
+defied the British Empire as represented by several gunboats, and
+dared them to fire on his ship of war, a tramp steamer which he had
+converted into a royal yacht. The gunboats were anchored about two
+hundred yards from the palace, which stands at the water's edge, and
+at the time agreed upon, they sank the Sultan's ship of war in the
+short space of three minutes, and in a brief bombardment destroyed
+the greater part of his palace. The ship of war still rests where
+she sank, and her topmasts peer above the water only three hundred
+yards distant from the windows of the new palace. They serve as a
+constant warning to all future sultans.
+
+The new palace is of somewhat too modern architecture, and is not
+nearly as dignified as are the massive white walls of the native
+houses which surround it. But within it is a fairy palace, hung with
+silk draperies, tapestries, and hand-painted curtains; the floors
+are covered with magnificent rugs from Persia and India, and the
+reception-room is crowded with treasures of ebony, ivory, lacquer
+work, and gold and silver. There were two thrones made of silver
+dragons, with many scales, and studded with jewels. The Sultan did
+not seem to mind our openly admiring his treasures, and his
+attendants, who stood about him in gorgeous-colored silks heavy with
+gold embroideries, were evidently pleased with the deep impression
+they made upon the visitors. The Sultan was very gentle and
+courteous and human, especially in the pleasure he took over his son
+and heir, who then was at school in England, and who, on the death
+of his father, succeeded him. He seemed very much gratified when we
+suggested that there was no better training-place for a boy than an
+English public school; as Americans, he thought our opinion must be
+unprejudiced. Before he sent us away, he gave Childs, and each of
+us, a photograph of himself, one of which is reproduced in this
+book.
+
+Our next port was the German settlement of Tanga. We arrived there
+just as a blood-red sun was setting behind great and gloomy
+mountains. The place itself was bathed in damp hot vapors, and
+surrounded even to the water's edge by a steaming jungle. It was
+more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we
+had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a
+trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the
+evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp
+three lions had kept him awake until morning.
+
+ [Illustration: Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+ Tanga.]
+
+The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports. We saw them
+only through field-glasses from the ship's side, so that there is,
+in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of
+Africa. But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the
+Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has passed
+away. It was certainly worth taking once. If I have failed to make
+that apparent, the fault lies with the writer. It is certainly not
+the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that
+"sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue," or of the
+exiles and "remittance men," or of the engineers who are building
+the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest
+which the East Coast presents in its problem of trade, of conquest,
+and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Congo and Coasts of Africa
+by Richard Harding Davis
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA ***
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Congo And Coasts Of Africa, by Richard Harding Davis, F.R.G.S..
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
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+          margin-bottom: 1em; }
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+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Congo and Coasts of Africa, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Congo and Coasts of Africa
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: December 8, 2004 [EBook #14297]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<a name="img1" id="img1"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-01.jpg" width="500" height="338" alt="Mr. Davis and &quot;Wood Boys&quot; of the Congo." title="Mr. Davis and &quot;Wood Boys&quot; of the Congo." />
+</div>
+<p class="cap">Mr. Davis and &quot;Wood Boys&quot; of the Congo. </p>
+<hr />
+
+<h1>THE CONGO AND</h1>
+<h1> COASTS OF AFRICA</h1>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>RICHARD HARDING DAVIS, <small>F.R.G.S.</small></h2>
+
+
+<p class="center"><small>AUTHOR OF &quot;SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE,&quot; &quot;THE SCARLET CAR,&quot; <br />&quot;WITH BOTH
+ARMIES IN SOUTH AFRICA,&quot; &quot;FARCES,&quot; &quot;THE CUBAN<br /> AND PORTO RICAN
+CAMPAIGNS&quot;</small></p>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<h4>ILLUSTRATIONS<br />
+FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR<br />
+AND OTHERS</h4>
+
+<br />
+
+<h5>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+NEW YORK<br />
+1907</h5>
+
+<hr />
+
+
+
+
+<h5>TO</h5>
+<h4>CECIL CLARK DAVIS</h4>
+
+<h5>MY FELLOW VOYAGER ALONG<br />
+THE COASTS OF AFRICA</h5>
+
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="8" summary="contents">
+<tr><td align='center'><b>i</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#I">The Coasters</a></td><td align='right'>3</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>ii</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#II">My Brother's Keeper</a></td><td align='right'>32</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>iii</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#III">The Capital of the Congo</a></td><td align='right'>55</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>iv</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#IV">Americans in the Congo</a></td><td align='right'>93</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>v</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#V">Hunting the Hippo</a></td><td align='right'>118</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>vi</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#VI">Old Calabar</a></td><td align='right'>142</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='center'><b>vii</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#VII">Along the East Coast</a></td><td align='right'>176</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<br />
+
+<hr class="short" />
+
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<a href="#img1"> R. Davis and "Wood Boys" of the Congo</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Frontispiece</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+  <a href="#img2"> Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed "Hammock," The Local Means
+     of Transport on the West Coast</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+ <a href="#img3">A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+     Whitewashed Stove at White Heat</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<a href="#img4">The "Mammy Chair" is Like Those Swings You See
+     in Public Playgrounds</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<a href="#img5">A Village on the Kasai River</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<a href="#img6">"Tenants" of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+     Belongs to Him, and that these Native People
+     are there only as His Tenants</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img7">The Facilities for Landing At Banana, the Port of
+     Entry to the Congo, are Limited</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+  <a href="#img8"> "Prisoners" of the State in Chains at Matadi</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+  <a href="#img9"> Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img10">The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, Not to
+   Stanley, but to Leopold</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img11">The <i>Deliverance</i>. 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</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img12">The Native Wife of a <i>Chef de Poste</i></a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img13">English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img14">The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American Concessionaires
+     Must Depend</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img15">Mr. Davis and Native "Boy," on the Kasai River</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img16">The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img17">The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img18">There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+     Pounding against Each Other</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img19">A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img20">The Palace of the King of the Cameroons</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img21">The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img22">The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+     Their Converts at Old Calabar</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img23">The Kroo Boys Sit, not on the Thwarts, but on the
+     Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img24">Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img25">One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+     Mozambique</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img26">Custom House, Zanzibar</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img27">Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img28">The Ivory on the Right, Covered only with Sacking,
+     is Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A.</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img29">The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img30">H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late
+     Sultan of Zanzibar</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img31">A German "Factory" at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+     Living Apartments Above</a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="itoc">
+   <a href="#img32">Soudanese Soldiers under a German Officer Outside
+    of Tanga</a>
+</p>
+
+<br />
+
+<hr />
+
+<br />
+
+
+<h3>THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA</h3>
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a>[3]</span>
+
+
+<h3>THE COASTERS</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>No matter how often one sets out, &quot;for to admire, and for to see,
+for to behold this world so wide,&quot; he never quite gets over being
+surprised at the erratic manner in which &quot;civilization&quot; 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
+&quot;influences of civilization&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>When a stone falls in a pool each part of each ripple is equally
+distant from the spot <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a>[4]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a>[5]</span>
+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 &quot;first families&quot; 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, &quot;the Gold Coast, the Ivory
+Coast, the Bight of Benin, and Old Calabar.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a>[6]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;factories,&quot; as they call their trading houses, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>[7]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>As our tender came alongside the <i>Bruxellesville</i> at Southampton, we
+saw at the winch Kroo boys of the Ivory Coast; leaning over the rail
+the S&oelig;urs 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 &quot;Coasters,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly every one of our passengers from Antwerp or Southampton knows
+that if he <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a>[8]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span>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 caf&eacute;s 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span>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 &quot;<i>U.S.S. Iowa</i>&quot; on the
+band to be quite familiar. Their secret <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span>is that they are built to
+support baskets and buckets of water, and that concealed in each is
+a heavy pad.</p>
+
+<a name="img2" id="img2"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-02.jpg" width="500" height="321" alt="Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed &quot;Hammock,&quot; the Local Means
+of Transport on the West Coast." title="Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed &quot;Hammock,&quot; the Local Means
+of Transport on the West Coast."  />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed &quot;Hammock,&quot; the Local Means
+of Transport on the West Coast. </p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span>Equator to-day as it
+did a thousand years ago, in inaccessible, inhospitable isolation.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span>harbor of Grand Bassam: &quot;I've seen
+just as much cargo lost overboard in that surf as I've seen shipped
+to Europe.&quot; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span>for little pay, that every foot of the West Coast
+is pre&euml;mpted. 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 &quot;protect&quot; that swamp; some
+treaty is filed as a title-deed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;a thin red line&quot; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The raids made upon the West Coast to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span>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 &quot;the fortress of Gibraltar, the Island of Minorca,
+and the monopoly in the slave trade for thirty years,&quot; or, as it was
+called, the <i>asiento</i> (contract). This was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span>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. &quot;After,&quot; he writes, &quot;going every day on shore to take the
+inhabitants by burning and despoiling of their towns,&quot; the ship was
+becalmed. &quot;But,&quot; he adds gratefully, &quot;the Almighty God, who never
+suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the breeze.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The slave book shows that as late as 1780 others of the &quot;elect&quot; of
+our own South were publishing advertisements like this, which is one
+of the shortest and mildest. It is from a Virginia newspaper: &quot;The
+said fellow is outlawed, and I will give ten pounds reward for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span>his
+head severed from his body, or forty shillings if brought alive.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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: &quot;What is all this declamation
+about human beings! This is a case of chattels or goods. It is
+really so&mdash;it is the case of throwing over goods. For the
+purpose&mdash;the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property;
+whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>As early as 1718 Raynal and Diderot estimated that up to that time
+there had been exported from Africa to the North and South <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Merchant
+Adventurers,&quot; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;fires in the forests, the beating of drums, and strange
+cries that issued from the bushes,&quot; 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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span>After the fifteenth century, in a succession of failures, five
+different companies of &quot;Royal Adventurers&quot; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Sierra Leone, as originally purchased in 1786, consisted of twenty
+square miles, for which among other articles of equal value King
+Naimbanna received a &quot;crimson satin embroidered waistcoat, one
+puncheon of rum, ten pounds of beads, two cheeses, one box of
+smoking pipes, a mock diamond ring, and a tierce of pork.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>What first impressed me about Sierra Leone was the heat. It does not
+permit one to give his attention wholly to anything else. I always
+have maintained that the hottest place on earth is New York, and I
+have been in other places with more than a local reputation for
+heat; some along the Equator, Louren&ccedil;o Marquez, which is only
+prevented from being an earthen oven because it is a swamp; the Red
+Sea, with a following breeze, and from both shores the baked heat of
+the desert, and Nagasaki, on a rainy day in midsummer.</p>
+
+<p>But New York in August radiating stored-up <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span>heat from iron-framed
+buildings, with the foul, dead air shut in by the skyscrapers, with
+a humidity that makes you think you are breathing through a
+steam-heated sponge, is as near the lower regions as I hope any of
+us will go. And yet Sierra Leone is no mean competitor.</p>
+
+<p>We climbed the moss-covered steps to the quay to face a great white
+building that blazed like the base of a whitewashed stove at white
+heat. Before it were some rusty cannon and a canoe cut out of a
+single tree, and, seated upon it selling fruit and sun-dried fish,
+some native women, naked to the waist, their bodies streaming with
+palm oil and sweat. At the same moment something struck me a blow on
+the top of the head, at the base of the spine and between the
+shoulder blades, and the ebony ladies and the white &quot;factory&quot; were
+burnt up in a scroll of flame.</p>
+
+<a name="img3" id="img3"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-03.jpg" width="500" height="326" alt="A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+Whitewashed Stove at White Heat." title="A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+Whitewashed Stove at White Heat." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+Whitewashed Stove at White Heat. </p>
+
+<p>I heard myself in a far-away voice asking where one could buy a sun
+helmet and a white umbrella, and until I was under their protection,
+Sierra Leone interested me no more.</p>
+
+<p>One sees more different kinds of black people in Sierra Leone than
+in any other port <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span>along the Coast; Senegalese and Senegambians,
+Kroo boys, Liberians, naked bush boys bearing great burdens from the
+forests, domestic slaves in fez and colored linen livery, carrying
+hammocks swung from under a canopy, the local electric hansom,
+soldiers of the W.A.F.F., the West African Frontier Force, in Zouave
+uniform of scarlet and khaki, with bare legs; Arabs from as far in
+the interior as Timbuctu, yellow in face and in long silken robes;
+big fat &quot;mammies&quot; in well-washed linen like the washerwomen of
+Jamaica, each balancing on her head her tightly rolled umbrella, and
+in the gardens slim young girls, with only a strip of blue and white
+linen from the waist to the knees, lithe, erect, with glistening
+teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission
+schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms.
+Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the
+tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public
+schools operated by the government as well as many others run by
+American and English missions, a club where the white &quot;mammies,&quot; as
+all women are called, and the white officers&mdash;for Sierra <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span>Leone is a
+coaling station on the Cape route to India, and is garrisoned
+accordingly&mdash;play croquet, and bowl into a net.</p>
+
+<p>When the officers are not bowling they are tramping into the
+hinterland after tribes on the warpath from Liberia, and coming
+back, perhaps wounded or racked with fever, or perhaps they do not
+come back. On the day we landed they had just buried one of the
+officers. On Saturday afternoon he had been playing tennis, during
+the night the fever claimed him, and Sunday night he was dead.</p>
+
+<p>That night as we pulled out to the steamer there came toward us in
+black silhouette against the sun, setting blood-red into the lagoon,
+two great canoes. They were coming from up the river piled high with
+fruit and bark, with the women and children lying huddled in the
+high bow and stern, while amidships the twelve men at the oars
+strained and struggled until we saw every muscle rise under the
+black skin.</p>
+
+<p>As their stroke slackened, the man in the bow with the tom-tom beat
+more savagely upon it, and shouted to them in shrill sharp cries.
+Their eyes shone, their teeth clenched, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span>the sweat streamed from
+their naked bodies. They might have been slaves chained to the
+thwarts of a trireme.</p>
+
+<p>Just ahead of them lay at anchor the only other ship beside our own
+in port, a two-masted schooner, the <i>Gladys E. Wilden</i>, out of
+Boston. Her captain leaned upon the rail smoking his cigar, his
+shirt-sleeves held up with pink elastics, on the back of his head a
+derby hat. As the rowers passed under his bows he looked critically
+at the streaming black bodies and spat meditatively into the water.
+His own father could have had them between decks as cargo. Now for
+the petroleum and lumber he brings from Massachusetts to Sierra
+Leone he returns in ballast.</p>
+
+<p>Because her lines were so home-like and her captain came from Cape
+Cod, we wanted to call on the <i>Gladys E. Wilden</i>, but our own
+captain had different views, and the two ships passed in the night,
+and the man from Boston never will know that two folks from home
+were burning signals to him.</p>
+
+<p>Because our next port of call, Grand Bassam, is the chief port of
+the French Ivory Coast, which is 125,000 square miles in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span>extent, we
+expected quite a flourishing seaport. Instead, Grand Bassam was a
+bank of yellow sand, a dozen bungalows in a line, a few wind-blown
+cocoanut palms, an iron pier, and a French flag. Beyond the cocoanut
+palms we could see a great lagoon, and each minute a wave leaped
+roaring upon the yellow sand-bank and tried to hurl itself across
+it, eating up the bungalows on its way, into the quiet waters of the
+lake. Each time we were sure it would succeed, but the yellow bank
+stood like rock, and, beaten back, the wave would rise in white
+spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the
+sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet
+of the bungalows.</p>
+
+<p>We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who
+had come out to join her husband. His factory is a two days' launch
+ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not
+speak English. Her husband had wished her, for her health's sake, to
+stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and
+against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had
+at once set out to join him. She was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span>a very pretty, sad, unsmiling
+young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband's partner
+questions about the new home. His answers, while they did not seem
+to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained
+safely in her London suburb.</p>
+
+<p>Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron
+pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her.</p>
+
+<p>The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and
+shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes
+staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow,
+another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the
+partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in
+white under the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>The husband and the young wife were swung together over the side to
+the lifting waves in a two-seated &quot;mammy chair,&quot; like one of those
+<i>vis-&agrave;-vis</i> swings you see in public playgrounds and picnic groves,
+and they carried with them, as a gift from Captain Burton, a fast
+melting lump of ice, the last piece of fresh meat they will taste in
+many a day, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span>the blessings of all the ship's company. And then,
+with inhospitable haste there was a rattle of anchor chains, a quick
+jangle of bells from the bridge to the engine-room, and the
+<i>Bruxellesville</i> swept out to sea, leaving the girl from the London
+suburb to find her way into the heart of Africa. Next morning we
+anchored in a dripping fog off Sekondi on the Gold Coast, to allow
+an English doctor to find his way to a fever camp. For nine years he
+had been a Coaster, and he had just gone home to fit himself, by a
+winter's vacation in London, for more work along the Gold Coast. It
+is said of him that he has &quot;never lost a life.&quot; On arriving in
+London he received a cable telling him three doctors had died, the
+miners along the railroad to Ashanti were rotten with fever, and
+that he was needed.</p>
+
+<a name="img4" id="img4"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 453px;">
+<img src="images/img-04.jpg" width="453" height="450" alt="The &quot;Mammy Chair&quot; is Like Those Swings You See in
+Public Playgrounds." title="The &quot;Mammy Chair&quot; is Like Those Swings You See in
+Public Playgrounds." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The &quot;Mammy Chair&quot; is Like Those Swings You See in
+Public Playgrounds. </p>
+
+<p>So he and his wife, as cheery and bright as though she were setting
+forth on her honeymoon, were going back to take up the white man's
+burden. We swung them over the side as we had the other two, and
+that night in the smoking-room the Coasters drank &quot;Luck to him,&quot;
+which, in the vernacular of this unhealthy shore, means &quot;Life to
+him,&quot; and to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span>the plucky, jolly woman who was going back to fight
+death with the man who had never lost a life.</p>
+
+<p>As the ship was getting under way, a young man in &quot;whites&quot; and a sun
+helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by
+which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled
+recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his
+helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt;
+that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for
+he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding
+as though we had been old acquaintances.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You going far?&quot; he asked. He spoke in the soft, detached voice of
+the public-school Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the Congo,&quot; I answered.</p>
+
+<p>He stood swaying with the ship, looking as though there were
+something he wished to say, and then laughed, and added gravely,
+giving me the greeting of the Coast: &quot;Luck to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Luck to YOU,&quot; I said.</p>
+
+<p>That is the worst of these gaddings about, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span>these meetings with men
+you wish you could know, who pass like a face in the crowded street,
+who hold out a hand, or give the password of the brotherhood, and
+then drop down the sea ladder and out of your life forever.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<a name="II" id="II"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span>
+
+<h3>MY BROTHER'S KEEPER</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>To me, the fact of greatest interest about the Congo is that it is
+owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned by
+one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not
+trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that
+in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it.
+Though backed by all the mailed fists in the German Empire, and all
+the <i>Dreadnoughts</i> of the seas, no other modern monarch would make
+such a claim. It does not sound like anything we have heard since
+the days and the ways of Pharaoh. And the most remarkable feature of
+it is, that the man who makes this claim is the man who was placed
+over the Congo as a guardian, to keep it open to the trade of the
+world, to suppress slavery. That, in the Congo, he has killed trade
+and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span>made the products of the land his own, that of the natives he
+did not kill he has made slaves, is what to-day gives the Congo its
+chief interest. It is well to emphasize how this one man stole a
+march on fourteen Powers, including the United States, and stole
+also an empire of one million square miles.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-five years ago all of Africa was divided into many parts. The
+part which still remained to be distributed among the Powers was
+that which was watered by the Congo River and its tributaries.</p>
+
+<p>Along the north bank of the Congo River ran the French Congo; the
+Portuguese owned the lands to the south, and on the east it was shut
+in by protectorates and colonies of Germany and England. It was, and
+is, a territory as large, were Spain and Russia omitted, as Europe.
+Were a map of the Congo laid upon a map of Europe, with the mouth of
+the Congo River where France and Spain meet at Biarritz, the
+boundaries of the Congo would reach south to the heel of Italy, to
+Greece, to Smyrna; east to Constantinople and Odessa; northeast to
+St. Petersburg and Finland, and northwest to the extreme limits of
+Scotland. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span>Distances in this country are so enormous, the means of
+progress so primitive, that many of the Belgian officers with whom I
+came south and who already had travelled nineteen days from Antwerp,
+had still, before they reached their posts, to steam, paddle, and
+walk for three months.</p>
+
+<p>In 1844 to dispose amicably of this great territory, which was much
+desired by several of the Powers, a conference was held at Berlin.
+There it was decided to make of the Congo Basin an Independent
+State, a &quot;free-for-all&quot; country, where every flag could trade with
+equal right, and with no special tariff or restriction.</p>
+
+<p>The General Act of this conference agreed: &quot;The trade of ALL nations
+shall enjoy complete freedom.&quot; &quot;No Power which exercises or shall
+exercise Sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions shall be
+allowed to <i>grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters
+of trade</i>.&quot; &quot;ALL the Powers exercising Sovereign rights or influence
+in the afore-said territories bind themselves to watch over the
+preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement
+of <i>the condition of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span>their moral and material welfare</i>, and <i>to
+help in suppressing slavery</i>.&quot; The italics are mine. These
+quotations from the act are still binding upon the fourteen Powers,
+including the United States.</p>
+
+<p>For several years previous to the Conference of Berlin, Leopold of
+Belgium, as a private individual, had shown much interest in the
+development of the Congo. The opening up of that territory was
+apparently his hobby. Out of his own pocket he paid for expeditions
+into the Congo Basin, employed German and English explorers, and
+protested against the then existing iniquities of the Arabs, who for
+ivory and slaves raided the Upper Congo. Finally, assisted by many
+geographical societies, he founded the International Association, to
+promote &quot;civilization and trade&quot; in Central Africa; and enlisted
+Henry M. Stanley in this service.</p>
+
+<p>That, in the early years, Leopold's interest in the Congo was
+unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now
+know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most
+unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span>may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented
+himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of
+administrator of this new territory.</p>
+
+<p>On the face of it he seemed an admirable choice. He was a sovereign
+of a kingdom too unimportant to be feared; of the newly created
+State he undoubtedly possessed an intimate knowledge. He promised to
+give to the Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders, already for many
+years established on the Congo, his heartiest aid, and, for those
+traders still to come, to maintain the &quot;open door.&quot; His professions
+of a desire to help the natives were profuse. He became the
+unanimous choice of the conference.</p>
+
+<p>Later he announced to the Powers signing the act, that from Belgium
+he had received the right to assume the title of King of the
+Independent State of the Congo. The Powers recognized his new title.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that Leopold, King of Belgium, was king also of the &Eacute;tat
+Ind&eacute;pendant du Congo confused many into thinking that the Free State
+was a colony, or under the protection, of Belgium. As we have seen,
+it is not. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span>A Belgian may serve in the army of the Free State, or in
+a civil capacity, as may a man of any nation, but, although with few
+exceptions only Belgians are employed in the Free State, and
+although to help the King in the Congo, the Belgian Government has
+loaned him great sums of money, politically and constitutionally the
+two governments are as independent of each other as France and
+Spain.</p>
+
+<p>And so, in 1885, Leopold, by the grace of fourteen governments, was
+appointed their steward over a great estate in which each of the
+governments still holds an equal right; a trustee and keeper over
+twenty millions of &quot;black brothers&quot; whose &quot;moral and material
+welfare&quot; each government had promised to protect.</p>
+
+<p>There is only one thing more remarkable than the fact that Leopold
+was able to turn this public market into a private park, and that
+is, that he has been permitted to do so. It is true he is a man of
+wonderful ability. For his own ends he is a magnificent organizer.
+But in the fourteen governments that created him there have been,
+and to-day there are, men, if less unscrupulous, of quite as great
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span>ability; statesmen, jealous and quick to guard the rights of the
+people they represent, people who since the twelfth century have
+been traders, who since 1808 have declared slavery abolished.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, for twenty-five years these statesmen have watched Leopold
+disobey every provision in the act of the conference. Were they to
+visit the Congo, they could see for themselves the jungle creeping
+in and burying their trading posts, their great factories turned
+into barracks. They know that the blacks they mutually agreed to
+protect have been reduced to slavery worse than that they suffered
+from the Arabs, that hundreds of thousands of them have fled from
+the Congo, and that those that remain have been mutilated, maimed,
+or, what was more merciful, murdered. And yet the fourteen
+governments, including the United States, have done nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Some tell you they do not interfere because they are jealous one of
+the other; others say that it is because they believe the Congo will
+soon be taken over by Belgium, and with Belgium in control, they
+argue, they would be dealing with a responsible government, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span>instead
+of with a pirate. But so long as Leopold is King of Belgium one
+doubts if Belgians in the Congo would rise above the level of their
+King. The English, when asked why they do not assert their rights,
+granted not only to them, but to thirteen other governments, reply
+that if they did they would be accused of &quot;ulterior motives.&quot; What
+ulterior motives? If you pursue a pickpocket and recover your watch
+from him, are your motives in doing so open to suspicion?</p>
+
+<p>Personally, although this is looking some way ahead, I would like to
+see the English take over and administrate the Congo. Wherever I
+visit a colony governed by Englishmen I find under their
+administration, in spite of opium in China and gin on the West
+Coast, that three people are benefited: the Englishman, the native,
+and the foreign trader from any other part of the world. Of the
+colonies of what other country can one say the same?</p>
+
+<p>As a rule our present governments are not loath to protect their
+rights. But toward asserting them in the Congo they have been moved
+neither by the protests of traders, chambers of commerce,
+missionaries, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span>public press, nor by the cry of the black man to
+&quot;let my people go.&quot; By only those in high places can it be
+explained. We will leave it as a curious fact, and return to the
+&quot;Unjust Steward.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His first act was to wage wars upon the Arabs. From the Soudan and
+from the East Coast they were raiding the Congo for slaves and
+ivory, and he drove them from it. By these wars he accomplished two
+things. As the defender of the slave, he gained much public credit,
+and he kept the ivory. But war is expensive, and soon he pointed out
+to the Powers that to ask him out of his own pocket to maintain
+armies in the field and to administer a great estate was unfair. He
+humbly sought their permission to levy a few taxes. It seemed a
+reasonable request. To clear roads, to keep boats upon the great
+rivers, to mark it with buoys, to maintain wood stations for the
+steamers, to improve the &quot;moral and material welfare of the
+natives,&quot; would cost money, and to allow Leopold to bring about
+these improvements, which would be for the good of all, he was
+permitted to levy the few taxes. That was twenty years ago; to-day I
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span>saw none of these improvements, and the taxes have increased.</p>
+
+<p>From the first they were so heavy that the great trade houses, which
+for one hundred years in peace and mutual goodwill bartered with the
+natives, found themselves ruined. It was not alone the export taxes,
+lighterage dues, port dues, and personal taxes that drove them out
+of the Congo; it was the King appearing against them as a rival
+trader, the man appointed to maintain the &quot;open door.&quot; And a trader
+with methods they could not or would not imitate. Leopold, or the
+&quot;State,&quot; saw for the existence of the Congo only two reasons: Rubber
+and Ivory. And the collecting of this rubber and ivory was, as he
+saw it, the sole duty of the State and its officers. When he threw
+over the part of trustee and became the Arab raider he could not
+waste his time, which, he had good reason to fear, might be short,
+upon products that, if fostered, would be of value only in later
+years. Still less time had he to give to improvements that cost
+money and that would be of benefit to his successors. He wanted only
+rubber; he wanted it at once, and he cared not at all how <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span>he
+obtained it. So he spun, and still spins, the greatest of all
+&quot;get-rich-quick&quot; schemes; one of gigantic proportions, full of
+tragic, monstrous, nauseous details.</p>
+
+<p>The only possible way to obtain rubber is through the native; as
+yet, in teeming forests, the white man can not work and live. Of
+even Chinese coolies imported here to build a railroad ninety per
+cent. died. So, with a stroke of the pen, Leopold declared all the
+rubber in the country the property of the &quot;State,&quot; and then, to make
+sure that the natives would work it, ordered that taxes be paid in
+rubber. If, once a month (in order to keep the natives steadily at
+work the taxes were ordered to be paid each month instead of once a
+year), each village did not bring in so many baskets of rubber the
+King's cannibal soldiers raided it, carried off the women as
+hostages, and made prisoners of the men, or killed and ate them. For
+every kilo of rubber brought in in excess of the quota the King's
+agent, who received the collected rubber and forwarded it down the
+river, was paid a commission. Or was &quot;paid by results.&quot; Another
+bonus was given him based on the price at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span>which he obtained the
+rubber. If he paid the native only six cents for every two pounds,
+he received a bonus of three cents, the cost to the State being but
+nine cents per kilo, but, if he paid the natives twelve cents for
+every two pounds, he received as a bonus less than one cent. In a
+word, the more rubber the agent collected the more he personally
+benefited, and if he obtained it &quot;cheaply&quot; or for nothing&mdash;that is,
+by taking hostages, making prisoners, by the whip of hippopotamus
+hide, by torture&mdash;so much greater his fortune, so much richer
+Leopold.</p>
+
+<a name="img5" id="img5"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-05.jpg" width="500" height="302" alt="A Village on the Kasai River." title="A Village on the Kasai River." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">A Village on the Kasai River. </p>
+
+<p>Few schemes devised have been more cynical, more devilish, more
+cunningly designed to incite a man to cruelty and abuse. To
+dishonesty it was an invitation and a reward. It was this system of
+&quot;payment by results,&quot; evolved by Leopold sooner than allow his
+agents a fixed and sufficient wage, that led to the atrocities.</p>
+
+<p>One result of this system was that in seven years the natives
+condemned to slavery in the rubber forests brought in rubber to the
+amount of fifty-five millions of dollars. But its chief results were
+the destruction of entire villages, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span>the flight from their homes in
+the Congo of hundreds of thousands of natives, and for those that
+remained misery, death, the most brutal tortures and degradations,
+unprintable, unthinkable.</p>
+
+<p>I am not going to enter into the question of the atrocities. In the
+Congo the tip has been given out from those higher up at Brussels to
+&quot;close up&quot; the atrocities; and for the present the evil places in
+the Tenderloin and along the Broadway of the Congo are tightly shut.
+But at those lonely posts, distant a month to three months' march
+from the capital, the cruelties still continue. I did not see them.
+Neither, last year, did a great many people in the United States see
+the massacre of blacks in Atlanta. But they have reason to believe
+it occurred. And after one has talked with the men and women who
+have seen the atrocities, has seen in the official reports that
+those accused of the atrocities do not deny having committed them,
+but point out that they were merely obeying orders, and after one
+has seen that even at the capital of Boma all the conditions of
+slavery exist, one is assured that in the jungle, away from the
+sight of men, all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span>things are possible. Merchants, missionaries, and
+officials even in Leopold's service told me that if one could spare
+a year and a half, or a year, to the work in the hinterland he would
+be an eye-witness of as cruel treatment of the natives as any that
+has gone before, and if I can trust myself to weigh testimony and
+can believe my eyes and ears I have reason to know that what they
+say is true. I am convinced that to-day a man, who feels that a year
+and a half is little enough to give to the aid of twenty millions of
+human beings, can accomplish in the Congo as great and good work as
+that of the Abolitionists.</p>
+
+<p>Three years ago atrocities here were open and above-board. For
+instance. In the opinion of the State the soldiers, in killing game
+for food, wasted the State cartridges, and in consequence the
+soldiers, to show their officers that they did not expend the
+cartridges extravagantly on antelope and wild boar, for each empty
+cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or
+child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts
+along the river. They are no longer in evidence. Neither is the
+flower-bed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span>of Lieutenant Dom, which was bordered with human skulls.
+A quaint conceit.</p>
+
+<p>The man to blame for the atrocities, for each separate atrocity, is
+Leopold. Had he shaken his head they would have ceased. When the hue
+and cry in Europe grew too hot for him and he held up his hand they
+did cease. At least along the main waterways. Years before he could
+have stopped them. But these were the seven fallow years, when
+millions of tons of red rubber were being dumped upon the wharf at
+Antwerp; little, roughly rolled red balls, like pellets of
+coagulated blood, which had cost their weight in blood, which would
+pay Leopold their weight in gold.</p>
+
+<p>He can not plead ignorance. Of all that goes on in his big
+plantation no man has a better knowledge. Without their personal
+honesty, he follows every detail of the &quot;business&quot; of his rubber
+farm with the same diligence that made rich men of George Boldt and
+Marshall Field. Leopold's knowledge is gained through many spies, by
+voluminous reports, by following up the expenditure of each centime,
+of each arm's-length of blue <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span>cloth. Of every Belgian employed on
+his farm, and ninety-five per cent. are Belgians, he holds the
+<i>dossier</i>; he knows how many kilos a month the agent whips out of
+his villages, how many bottles of absinthe he smuggles from the
+French side, whether he lives with one black woman or five, why his
+white wife in Belgium left him, why he left Belgium, why he dare not
+return. The agent knows that Leopold, King of the Belgians, knows,
+and that he has shared that knowledge with the agent's employer, the
+man who by bribes of rich bonuses incites him to crime, the man who
+could throw him into a Belgian jail, Leopold, King of the Congo.</p>
+
+<p>The agent decides for him it is best to please both Leopolds, and
+Leopold makes no secret of what best pleases him. For not only is he
+responsible for the atrocities, in that he does not try to suppress
+them, but he is doubly guilty in that he has encouraged them. This
+he has done with cynical, callous publicity, without effort at
+concealment, without shame. Men who, in obtaining rubber, committed
+unspeakable crimes, the memory of which makes other men
+uncomfortable in their presence, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span>Leopold rewarded with rich
+bonuses, pensions, higher office, gilt badges of shame, and rapid
+advancement. To those whom even his own judges sentenced to many
+years' imprisonment he promptly granted the royal pardon, promoted,
+and sent back to work in the vineyard.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That is the sort of man for <i>me</i>,&quot; his action seemed to say. &quot;See
+how I value that good and faithful servant. That man collected much
+rubber. You observe I do not ask how he got it. I will not ask you.
+All you need do is to collect rubber. Use our improved methods. Gum
+copal rubbed in the kinky hair of the chief and then set on fire
+burns, so my agents tell me, like vitriol. For collecting rubber the
+chief is no longer valuable, but to his successor it is an
+object-lesson. Let me recommend also the <i>chicotte</i>, the torture
+tower, the 'hostage' house, and the crucifix. Many other stimulants
+to labor will no doubt suggest themselves to you and to your
+cannibal 'sentries.' Help to make me rich, and don't fear the
+'State.' '<i>L'Etat, c'est moi!</i>' Go as far as you like!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I said the degradations and tortures <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span>practised by the men &quot;working
+on commission&quot; for Leopold are unprintable, but they have been
+printed, and those who wish to read a calmly compiled, careful, and
+correct record of their deeds will find it in the &quot;Red Rubber&quot; of
+Mr. E.R. Morel. An even better book by the same authority, on the
+whole history of the State, is his &quot;King Leopold's Rule in the
+Congo.&quot; Mr. Morel has many enemies. So, early in the nineteenth
+century, had the English Abolitionists, Wilberforce and Granville
+Sharp. After they were dead they were buried in the Abbey, and their
+portraits were placed in the National Gallery. People who wish to
+assist in freeing twenty millions of human beings should to-day
+support Mr. Morel. It will be of more service to the blacks than,
+after he is dead, burying him in Westminster Abbey.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Morel, the American and English missionaries, and the English
+Consul, Roger Casement, and other men, in Belgium, have made a
+magnificent fight against Leopold; but the Powers to whom they have
+appealed have been silent. Taking courage of this silence, Leopold
+has divided the Congo into <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span>several great territories in which the
+sole right to work rubber is conceded to certain persons. To those
+who protested that no one in the Congo &quot;Free&quot; State but the King
+could trade in rubber, Leopold, as an answer, pointed with pride at
+the preserves of these foreigners. And he may well point at them
+with pride, for in some of those companies he owns a third, and in
+most of them he holds a half, or a controlling interest. The
+directors of the foreign companies are his cronies, members of his
+royal household, his brokers, bankers. You have only to read the
+names published in the lists of the Brussels Stock Exchange to see
+that these &quot;trading companies,&quot; under different aliases, are
+Leopold. Having, then, &quot;conceded&quot; the greater part of the Congo to
+himself, Leopold set aside the best part of it, so far as rubber is
+concerned, as a <i>Domaine Priv&eacute;</i>. Officially the receipts of this pay
+for running the government, and for schools, roads and wharfs, for
+which taxes were levied, but for which, after twenty years, one
+looks in vain. Leopold claims that through the Congo he is out of
+pocket; that this carrying the banner of civilization in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span>Africa
+does not pay. Through his press bureaus he tells that his sympathy
+for his black brother, his desire to see the commerce of the world
+busy along the Congo, alone prevents him giving up what is for him a
+losing business. There are several answers to this. One is that in
+the Kasai Company alone Leopold owns 2,010 shares of stock. Worth
+originally $50 a share, the value of each share rose to $3,100,
+making at one time his total shares worth $5,421,000. In the
+A.B.I.R. Concession he owns 1,000 shares, originally worth $100
+each, later worth $940. In the &quot;vintage year&quot; of 1900 each of these
+shares was worth $5,050, and the 1,000 shares thus rose to the value
+of $5,050,000.</p>
+
+<p>These are only two companies. In most of the others half the shares
+are owned by the King.</p>
+
+<p>As published in the &quot;State Bulletin,&quot; the money received in eight
+years for rubber and ivory gathered in the <i>Domaine Priv&eacute;</i> differs
+from the amount given for it in the market at Antwerp. The official
+estimates show a loss to the government. The actual sales show that
+the government, over and above its own <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span>estimate of its expenses,
+instead of losing, made from the <i>Domaine Priv&eacute;</i> alone $10,000,000.
+We are left wondering to whom went that unaccounted-for $10,000,000.
+Certainly the King would not take it, for, to reimburse himself for
+his efforts, he early in the game reserved for himself another tract
+of territory known as the <i>Domaine de la Couronne</i>. For years he
+denied that this existed. He knew nothing of Crown Lands. But, at
+last, in the Belgian Chamber, it was publicly charged that for years
+from this private source, which he had said did not exist, Leopold
+had been drawing an income of $15,000,000. Since then the truth of
+this statement has been denied, but at the time in the Chamber it
+was not contradicted.</p>
+
+<p>To-day, grown insolent by the apathy of the Powers, Leopold finds
+disguising himself as a company, as a laborer worthy of his hire,
+irksome. He now decrees that as &quot;Sovereign&quot; over the Congo all of
+the Congo belongs to him. It is as much his property as is a
+pheasant drive, as is a staked-out mining claim, as your hat is your
+property. And the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are there
+only <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span>on his sufferance. They are his &quot;tenants.&quot; He permits each
+the hut in which he lives, and the garden adjoining that hut, but
+his work must be for Leopold, and everything else, animal, mineral,
+or vegetable, belongs to Leopold. The natives not only may not sell
+ivory or rubber to independent traders, but if it is found in their
+possession it is seized; and if you and I bought a tusk of ivory
+here it would be taken from us and we could be prosecuted. This is
+the law. Other men rule over territories more vast even than the
+Congo. The King of England rules an empire upon which the sun never
+sets. But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even
+the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could
+not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going
+into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa
+and saying: &quot;This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must
+not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American. If they
+buy from you they are 'receivers of stolen goods.' To feed my
+soldiers you must drag my river for my fish. For me, in my swamp and
+in my jungle, you <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span>must toil twenty-four days of each month to
+gather my rubber. You must not hunt the elephants, for they are my
+elephants. Those tusks that fifty years ago your grandfather, with
+his naked spear, cut from an elephant, and which you have tried to
+hide from me under the floor of this hut, are my ivory. Because that
+elephant, running wild through the jungle fifty years ago, belonged
+to me. And you yourself are mine, your time is mine, your labor is
+mine, your wife, your children, all are mine. They belong to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img6" id="img6"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-06.jpg" width="500" height="319" alt="&quot;Tenants&quot; of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+Tenants." title="&quot;Tenants&quot; of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+Tenants." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">&quot;Tenants&quot; of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+Belongs to Him, <br />
+and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+Tenants. </p>
+
+<p>This, then, is the &quot;open door&quot; as I find it to-day in the Congo. It
+is an incredible state of affairs, so insolent, so magnificent in
+its impertinence, that it would be humorous, were it not for its
+background of misery and suffering, for its hostage houses, its
+chain gangs, its <i>chicottes</i>, its nameless crimes against the human
+body, its baskets of dried hands held up in tribute to the Belgian
+blackguard.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span>
+
+<h3>THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Leopold's &quot;shop&quot; has its front door at Banana. Its house flag is a
+golden star on a blue background. Banana is the port of entry to the
+Congo. You have, no doubt, seen many ports of Europe&mdash;Antwerp,
+Hamburg, Boulogne, Lisbon, Genoa, Marseilles. Banana is the port of
+entry to a country as large as Western Europe, and while the imports
+and exports of Europe trickle through all these cities, the commerce
+of the Congo enters and departs entirely at Banana. You can then
+picture the busy harbor, the jungle of masts, the white bridges and
+awnings of the steamers. By the fat funnels and the flags you can
+distinguish the English tramps, the German merchantmen, the French,
+Dutch, Italian, Portuguese traders, the smart &quot;liners&quot; from
+Liverpool, even the Arab dhows with bird-wing sails, even the steel,
+four-masted <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span>schooners out of Boston, U.S.A. You can imagine the
+toiling lighters, the slap-dash tenders, the launches with shrieking
+whistles.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, you suspect it is not a bit like that. But were it for
+fourteen countries the &quot;open door&quot; to twenty millions of people,
+that is how it might look.</p>
+
+<p>Instead, it is the private entrance to the preserves of a private
+individual. So what you really see is, on the one hand, islands of
+mangrove bushes, with their roots in the muddy water; on the other,
+Banana, a strip of sand and palm trees without a wharf, quay,
+landing stage, without a pier to which you could make fast anything
+larger than a rowboat.</p>
+
+<p>In a canoe naked natives paddle alongside to sell fish; a peevish
+little man in a sun hat, who, in order to save Leopold three
+salaries, holds four port offices, is being rowed to the gangway; on
+shore the only other visible inhabitant of Banana, a man with no
+nerves, is disturbing the brooding, sweating silence by knocking the
+rust off the plates of a stranded mud-scow. Welcome to our city!
+Welcome to busy, bustling Banana, the port of entry of the Congo
+Free State.</p>
+
+<a name="img7" id="img7"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-07.jpg" width="500" height="352" alt="The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+Entry to the Congo, Are Limited." title="The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+Entry to the Congo, Are Limited." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+Entry to the Congo, Are Limited. </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span>In a canoe we were paddled to the back yard of the caf&eacute; of Madame
+Samuel, and from that bower of warm beer and sardine tins trudged
+through the sun up one side of Banana and down the other. In between
+the two paths were the bungalows and gardens of forty white men and
+two white women. Many of the gardens, as was most of Banana, were
+neglected, untidy, littered with condensed-milk tins. Others, more
+carefully tended, were laid out in rigid lines. With all tropical
+nature to draw upon, nothing had been imagined. The most ambitious
+efforts were designs in whitewashed shells and protruding beer
+bottles. We could not help remembering the gardens in Japan, of the
+poorest and the most ignorant coolies. Do I seem to find fault with
+Banana out of all proportion to its importance? It is because
+Banana, the Congo's most advanced post of civilization, is typical
+of all that lies beyond.</p>
+
+<p>From what I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy,
+malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy,
+monotonous, depressing.</p>
+
+<p>But on the way to Boma and, later, when <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span>I travelled on the Upper
+Congo, I thought the river more beautiful than any great river I had
+ever seen. It was full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes it ran
+between palm-covered banks of yellow sand as low as those of the
+Mississippi or the Nile; and again, in half an hour, the banks were
+rock and as heavily wooded as the mountains of Montana, or as white
+and bold as the cliffs of Dover, or we passed between great hills,
+covered with what looked like giant oaks, and with their peaks
+hidden in the clouds. I found it like no other river, because in
+some one particular it was like them all. Between Banana and Boma
+the banks first screened us in with the tangled jungle of the
+tropics, and then opened up great wind-swept plateaux, leading to
+hills that suggested&mdash;of all places&mdash;England, and, at that,
+cultivated England. The contour of the hills, the shape of the
+trees, the shade of their green contrasted with the green of the
+grass, were like only the cliffs above Plymouth. One did not look
+for native kraals and the wild antelope, but for the square,
+ivy-topped tower of the village church, the loaf-shaped hayricks,
+slow-moving masses of sheep. But <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span>this that looks like a pasture
+land is only coarse limestone covered with bitter, unnutritious
+grass, which benefits neither beast nor man.</p>
+
+<p>At sunset we anchored in the current three miles from Boma, and at
+daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the
+government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor,
+who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper
+and as a king by divine right. He is a figurehead. The real
+administrator is M. Vandamme, the Secr&eacute;taire-G&eacute;n&eacute;ral, the
+ubiquitous, the mysterious, whose name before you leave Southampton
+is in the air, of whom all men, whether they speak in French or
+English, speak well. It is from Boma that M. Vandamme sends
+collectors of rubber, politely labeled inspecteurs, directeurs,
+judges, capitaines, and sous-lieutenants to their posts, and
+distributes them over one million square miles.</p>
+
+<p>Boma is the capital of a country which is as large as six nations of
+the European continent. For twenty-five years it has been the
+capital. Therefore, the reader already guesses that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span>Boma has only
+one wharf, and at that wharf there is no custom-house, no warehouse,
+not even a canvas awning under which, during the six months of rainy
+season, one might seek shelter for himself and his baggage.</p>
+
+<p>Our debarkation reminded me of a landing of filibusters. A wharf
+forty yards long led from the steamer to the bank. Down this marched
+the officers of the army, the clerks, the bookkeepers, and on the
+bank and in the street each dumped his boxes, his sword, his
+camp-bed, his full-dress helmet. It looked as though a huge eviction
+had taken place, as though a retreating army, having gained the
+river's edge, were waiting for a transport. It was not as though to
+the government the coming of these gentlemen was a complete
+surprise; regularly every three weeks at that exact spot a like
+number disembark. But in years the State has not found it worth
+while to erect for them even an open zinc shed. The cargo invoiced
+to the State is given equal consideration.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Prisoners of the State,&quot; each wearing round his neck a steel ring
+from which a chain stretches to the ring of another &quot;prisoner,&quot;
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span>carried the cargo to the open street, where lay the luggage of the
+officers, and there dropped it. Mingled with steamer chairs, tin
+bathtubs, gun-cases, were great crates of sheet iron, green boxes of
+gin, bags of Teneriffe potatoes, boilers of an engine. Upon the
+scene the sun beat with vicious, cruel persistence. Those officers
+who had already served in the Congo dropped their belongings under
+the shadow of a solitary tree. Those who for the first time were
+seeing the capital of the country they had sworn to serve sank upon
+their boxes and, with dismay in their eyes, mopped their red and
+dripping brows.</p>
+
+<a name="img8" id="img8"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-08.jpg" width="500" height="308" alt="&quot;Prisoners&quot; of the State in Chains at Matadi." title="&quot;Prisoners&quot; of the State in Chains at Matadi."/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">&quot;Prisoners&quot; of the State in Chains at Matadi. </p>
+
+<p>Boma is built at the foot of a hill of red soil. It is a town of
+scattered buildings made of wood and sheet-iron plates, sent out in
+crates, and held together with screws. To Boma nature has been
+considerate. She has contributed many trees, two or three long
+avenues of palms, and in the many gardens caused flowers to blossom
+and flourish. In the report of the &quot;Commission of Enquiry&quot; which
+Leopold was forced to send out in 1904 to investigate the
+atrocities, and each member of which, for his four months' work,
+received <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span>$20,000, Boma is described as possessing &quot;the daintiness
+and <i>chic</i> of a European watering-place.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Boma really is like a seaport of one of the Central American republics.
+It has a temporary sufficient-to-the-day-for-to-morrow-we-die air.
+It looks like a military post that at any moment might be abandoned.
+To remove this impression the State has certain exhibits which seem
+to point to a stable and good government. There is a well-conducted
+hospital and clean, well-built barracks; for the amusement of the
+black soldiers even a theatre, and for the higher officials
+attractive bungalows, a bandstand, where twice a week a negro band
+plays by ear, and plays exceedingly well. There is even a
+lawn-tennis court, where the infrequent visitor to the Congo is
+welcomed, and, by the courteous Mr. Vandamme, who plays tennis as
+well as he does every thing else, entertained. Boma is the shop
+window of Leopold's big store. The good features of Boma are like
+those attractive articles one sometimes sees in a shop window, but
+which in the shop one fails to find&mdash;at least, I did not find them
+in the shop. Outside of Boma <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span>I looked in vain for a school
+conducted by the State, like the one at Boma, such as those the
+United States Government gave by the hundred to the Philippines. I
+found not one. And I looked for such a hospital as the one I saw at
+Boma, such as our government has placed for its employes along, and
+at both ends of, the Isthmus of Panama, and, except for the one at
+Leopoldville, I saw none.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the fact that Boma is a &quot;European watering-place,&quot; all
+the servants of the State with whom I talked wanted to get away from
+it, especially those who already had served in the interior. To
+appreciate what Boma lacks one has only to visit the neighboring
+seaports on the same coast; the English towns of Sierra Leone and
+Calabar, the French town of Libreville in the French Congo, the
+German seaport Duala in the Cameroons, but especially Calabar in
+Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years
+younger than Boma, and in its municipal government, its
+street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons,
+hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital;
+it is the distributing factory for a huge trading <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span>concern, and a
+particularly selfish one. There is, as I have said, only one wharf,
+and at that wharf, without paying the State, only State boats may
+discharge cargo, so the English, Dutch, and German boats are forced
+to &quot;tie up&quot; along the river front. There the grass is eight feet
+high and breeds mosquitoes and malaria, and conceals the wary
+crocodile. At night, from the deck of the steamer, all one can see
+of this capital is a fringe of this high grass in the light from the
+air ports, and on shore three gas-lamps. No caf&eacute;s are open, no
+sailors carouse, no lighted window suggests that some one is giving
+a dinner, that some one is playing bridge. Darkness, gloom, silence
+mark this &quot;European watering-place.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You ask me,&quot; demanded a Belgian lieutenant one night as we stood
+together by the rail, &quot;whether I like better the bush, where there
+is no white man in a hundred miles, or to be stationed at Boma?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He threw out his hands at the gas-lamps, rapidly he pointed at each
+of them in turn.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Voil&agrave;, Boma!&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p>From Boma we steamed six hours farther up the river to Matadi. On
+the way we stopped <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span>at Noqui, the home of Portuguese traders on the
+Portuguese bank, which, as one goes up-stream, lies to starboard.
+Here the current runs at from four to five miles an hour, and has so
+sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with
+the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used
+more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to
+see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank
+looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her
+propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, cutting
+the eel-grass.</p>
+
+<p>At Matadi the Congo makes one of her lightning changes. Her banks,
+which have been low and woody, with, on the Portuguese side,
+glimpses of boundless plateaux, become towering hills of rock. At
+Matadi the cataracts and rapids begin, and for two hundred miles
+continue to Stanley Pool, which is the beginning of the Upper Congo.
+Leopoldville is situated on Stanley Pool, just to the right of where
+the rapids start their race to the south. With Leopoldville above
+and Boma below, still nearer the mouth of the river, Matadi makes a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span>centre link in the chain of the three important towns of the Lower
+Congo.</p>
+
+<p>When Henry M. Stanley was halted by the cataracts and forced to
+leave the river he disembarked his expedition on the bank opposite
+Matadi, and a mile farther up-stream. It was from this point he
+dragged and hauled his boats, until he again reached smooth water at
+Stanley Pool. The wagons on which he carried the boats still can be
+seen lying on the bank, broken and rusty. Like the sight of old gun
+carriages and dismantled cannon, they give one a distinct thrill.
+Now, on the bank opposite from where they lie, the railroad runs
+from Matadi to Leopoldville.</p>
+
+<p>The Congo forces upon one a great admiration for Stanley. Unless
+civilization utterly alters it, it must always be a monument to his
+courage, and as you travel farther and see the difficulties placed
+in his way, your admiration increases. There are men here who make
+little of what Stanley accomplished; but they are men who seldom
+leave their own compound, and, who, when they do go up the river,
+travel at ease, not in a canoe, or on foot <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span>through the jungle, but
+in the smoking-room of the steamer and in a first-class railroad
+carriage. That they are able so to travel is due to the man they
+would belittle. The nickname given to Stanley by the natives is
+to-day the nickname of the government. Matadi means rock. When
+Stanley reached the town of Matadi, which is surrounded entirely by
+rock, he began with dynamite to blast roads for his caravan. The
+natives called him Bula Matadi, the Breaker of Rocks, and, as in
+those days he was the Government, the Law, and the Prophets, Bula
+Matadi, who then was the white man who governed, now signifies the
+white man's government. But it is a very different government, and a
+very different white man. With the natives the word is universal.
+They say &quot;Bula Matadi wood post.&quot; &quot;Not traders' chop, Bula Matadi's
+chop.&quot; &quot;Him no missionary steamer, him Bula Matadi steamer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The town of Matadi is of importance as the place where, owing to the
+rapids, passengers and cargoes are reshipped on the railroad to the
+<i>haut Congo</i>. It is a railroad terminus only, and it looks it. The
+railroad station and store-houses <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span>are close to the river bank, and,
+spread over several acres of cinders, are the railroad yard and
+machine shops. Above those buildings of hot corrugated zinc and the
+black soil rises a great rock. It is not so large as Gibraltar, or
+so high as the Flatiron Building, but it is a little more steep than
+either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat
+stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove
+lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their
+surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your
+stomach, and the soles of your mosquito boots. The three streets
+lead to a parade ground no larger than and as bare as a brickyard.
+It is surrounded by the buildings of Bula Matadi, the post-office,
+the custom-house, the barracks, and the Caf&eacute; Franco-Belge. It has a
+tableland fifty yards wide of yellow clay so beaten by thousands of
+naked feet, so baked by the heat, that it is as hard as a brass
+shield. Other tablelands may be higher, but this is the one nearest
+the sun. You cross it wearily, in short rushes, with your heart in
+your throat, and seeking shade, as a man crossing the zone of fire
+seeks cover from the bullets. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span>When you reach the cool, dirty
+custom-house, with walls two feet thick, you congratulate yourself
+on your escape; you look back into the blaze of the flaming plaza
+and wonder if you have the courage to return.</p>
+
+<a name="img9" id="img9"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 336px;">
+<img src="images/img-09.jpg" width="336" height="450" alt="Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade."
+title="Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade. </p>
+
+<p>At the custom-house I paid duty on articles I could not possibly
+have bought anywhere in the Congo, as, for instance, a tent and a
+folding-bed, and for a license to carry arms. A young man with a
+hammer and tiny branding irons beat little stars and the number of
+my license to <i>porter d'armes</i> on the stock of each weapon. Without
+permission of Bula Matadi on leaving the Congo, one can not sell his
+guns, or give them away. This is a precaution to prevent weapons
+falling into the hands of the native. For some reason a native with
+a gun alarms Bula Matadi. Just on the other bank of the river the
+French, who do not seem to fear the black brother, sell him
+flint-lock rifles, as many as his heart desires.</p>
+
+<p>On the steamer there was a mild young missionary coming out, for the
+first time, to whom some unobserving friend had given a fox-terrier.
+The young man did not care for the dog. He had never owned a dog,
+and did not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span>know what to do with this one. Her name was &quot;Fanny,&quot;
+and only by the efforts of all on board did she reach the Congo
+alive. There was no one, from the butcher to the captain, including
+the passengers, who had not shielded Fanny from the cold, and later
+from the sun, fed her, bathed her, forced medicine down her throat,
+and raced her up and down the spar deck. Consequently we all knew
+Fanny, and it was a great shock when from the custom-house I saw her
+running around the blazing parade ground, her eyes filled with fear
+and &quot;lost dog&quot; written all over her, from her drooping tongue to her
+drooping tail. Captain Burton and I called &quot;Fanny,&quot; and, not seeking
+suicide for ourselves, sent half a dozen black boys to catch her.
+But Fanny never liked her black uncles; on the steamer the Kroo boys
+learned to give her the length of her chain, and so we were forced
+to plunge to her rescue into the valley of heat. Perhaps she thought
+we were again going to lock her up on the steamer, or perhaps that
+it was a friendly game, for she ran from us as fast as from the
+black boys. In Matadi no one ever had crossed the parade ground
+except at a funeral march, and the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span>spectacle of two large white
+men playing tag with a small fox-terrier attracted an immense
+audience. The officials and clerks left work and peered between the
+iron-barred windows, the &quot;prisoners&quot; in chains ceased breaking rock
+and stared dumbly from the barracks, the black &quot;sentries&quot; shrieked
+and gesticulated, the naked bush boys, in from a long caravan
+journey, rose from the side of their burdens and commented upon our
+man&oelig;uvres in gloomy, guttural tones. I suspect they thought we
+wanted Fanny for &quot;chop.&quot; Finally Fanny ran into the legs of a German
+trader, who grabbed her by the neck and held her up to us.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You want him? Hey?&quot; he shouted.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ay, man,&quot; gasped Burton, now quite purple, &quot;did you think we were
+trying to amuse the dog?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I made a leash of my belt, and the captain returned to the ship
+dragging his prisoner after him. An hour later I met the youthful
+missionary leading Fanny by a rope.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I must tell you about Fanny,&quot; he cried. &quot;After I took her to the
+Mission I forgot to tie her up&mdash;as I suppose I should have done&mdash;and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span>she ran away. But, would you believe it, she found her way straight
+back to the ship. Was it not intelligent of her?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I was too far gone with apoplexy, heat prostration, and sunstroke to
+make any answer, at least one that I could make to a missionary.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Fanny, the young missionary, and I left for
+Leopoldville on the railroad. It is a narrow-gauge railroad built
+near Matadi through the solid rock and later twisting and turning so
+often that at many places one can see the track on three different
+levels. It is not a State road, but was built and is owned by a
+Dutch company, and, except that it charges exorbitant rates and does
+not keep its carriages clean, it is well run, and the road-bed is
+excellent. But it runs a passenger train only three times a week,
+and though the distance is so short, and though the train starts at
+6:30 in the morning, it does not get you to Leopoldville the same
+day. Instead, you must rest over night at Thysville and start at
+seven the next morning. That afternoon at three you reach
+Leopoldville. For the two hundred and fifty miles the fare is two
+hundred francs, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span>and one is limited to sixty pounds of luggage. That
+was the weight allowed by the Japanese to each war correspondent,
+and as they gave us six months in Tokio in which to do nothing else
+but weigh our equipment, I left Matadi without a penalty. Had my
+luggage exceeded the limit, for each extra pound I would have had to
+pay the company ten cents. To the Belgian officers and agents who go
+for three years to serve the State in the bush the regulation is
+especially harsh, and in a company so rich, particularly mean. To
+many a poor officer, and on the pay they receive there are no rich
+ones, the tax is prohibitive. It forces them to leave behind
+medicines, clothing, photographic supplies, all ammunition, which
+means no chance of helping out with duck and pigeon the daily menu
+of goat and tinned sausages, and, what is the greatest hardship, all
+books. This regulation, which the State permitted to the
+concessionaires of the railroad, sends the agents of the State into
+the wilderness physically and mentally unequipped, and it is no
+wonder the weaker brothers go mad, and act accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>My black boys travelled second-class, which <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span>means an open car with
+narrow seats very close together and a wooden roof. On these cars
+passengers are allowed twenty pounds of luggage and permitted to
+collect two hundred and fifty miles of heat and dust. To a black boy
+twenty pounds is little enough, for he travels with much more
+baggage than an average &quot;blanc.&quot; I am not speaking of the Congo boy.
+All the possessions the State leaves him he could carry in his
+pockets, and he has no pockets. But wherever he goes the Kroo boy,
+Mendi boy, or Sierra Leone boy carries all his belongings with him
+in a tin trunk painted pink, green, or yellow. He is never separated
+from his &quot;box,&quot; and the recognized uniform of a Kroo boy at work, is
+his breechcloth, and hanging from a ribbon around his knee, the key
+to his box. If a boy has no box he generally carries three keys.</p>
+
+<p>In the first-class car were three French officers en route to
+Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo, and a dog, a sad
+mongrel, very dirty, very hungry. On each side of the tiny toy car
+were six revolving-chairs, so the four men, not to speak of the dog,
+quite filled it. And to our own bulk each added hand-bags, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span>cases of
+beer, helmets, gun-cases, cameras, water-bottles, and, as the road
+does not supply food of any kind, his chop-box. A chop-box is
+anything that holds food, and for food of every kind, for the hours
+of feeding, and the verb &quot;to feed,&quot; on the West Coast, the only
+word, the &quot;lazy&quot; word, is &quot;chop.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The absent-minded young missionary, with Fanny jammed between his
+ankles, and looking out miserably upon the world, and two other
+young missionaries, travelled second-class.</p>
+
+<p>They were even more crowded together than were we, but not so much
+with luggage as with humanity. But as a protest against the high
+charges of the railroad the missionaries always travel in the open
+car. These three young men were for the first time out of England,
+and in any fashion were glad to start on their long journey up the
+Congo to Bolobo. To them whatever happened was a joke. It was a joke
+even when the colored &quot;wife&quot; of one of the French officers used the
+broad shoulders of one of them as a pillow and slept sweetly. She
+was a large, good-natured, good-looking mulatto, and at the frequent
+stations the French officer ran back to her with &quot;white man's chop,&quot;
+a tin <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span>of sausages, a pineapple, a bottle of beer. She drank the
+beer from the bottle, and with religious tolerance offered it to the
+Baptists. They assured her without the least regret that they were
+teetotalers. To the other blacks in the open car the sight of a
+white man waiting on one of their own people was a thrilling
+spectacle. They regarded the woman who could command such services
+with respect. It would be interesting to know what they thought of
+the white man. At each station the open car disgorged its occupants
+to fill with water the beer bottle each carried, and to buy from the
+natives kwango, the black man's bread, a flaky, sticky flour that
+tastes like boiled chestnuts; and pineapples at a franc for ten. And
+such pineapples! Not hard and rubber-like, as we know them at home,
+but delicious, juicy, melting in the mouth like hothouse grapes,
+and, also, after each mouthful, making a complete bath necessary.
+One of the French officers had a lump of ice which he broke into
+pieces and divided with the others. They saluted magnificently many
+times, and as each drowned the morsel in his tin cup of beer, one of
+them cried with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span>perfect simplicity: &quot;C'est Paris!&quot; This reminded me
+that the ship's steward had placed much ice in my chop basket, and I
+carried some of it to another car in which were five of the White
+Sisters. For nineteen days I had been with them on the steamer, but
+they had spoken to no one, and I was doubtful how they would accept
+my offering. But the Mother Superior gave permission, and they took
+the ice through the car window, their white hoods bristling with the
+excitement of the adventure. They were on their way to a post still
+two months' journey up the river, nearly to Lake Tanganyika, and for
+three years or, possibly, until they died, that was the last ice
+they would see.</p>
+
+<p>At Bongolo station the division superintendent came in the car and
+everybody offered him refreshment, and in return he told us, in the
+hope of interesting us, of a washout, and then casually mentioned
+that an hour before an elephant had blocked the track. It seemed so
+much too good to be true that I may have expressed some doubt, for
+he said: &quot;Why, of course and certainly. Already this morning one was
+at Sariski Station and another at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span>Sipeto.&quot; And instead of looking
+out of the window I had been reading an American magazine, filched
+from the smoking-room, which was one year old!</p>
+
+<p>At Thysville the railroad may have opened a hotel, but when I was
+there to hunt for a night's shelter it turned you out bag and
+baggage. The French officers decided to risk a Portuguese trading
+store known as the &quot;Ideal Hotel,&quot; and the missionaries very kindly
+gave me the freedom of their Rest House. It is kept open for
+those of the Mission who pass between the Upper and Lower Congo.
+At the station the young missionaries were met by two older
+missionaries&mdash;Mr. Weekes, who furnished the &quot;Commission of Enquiry&quot;
+with much evidence, which they would not, or were not allowed to,
+print, and Mr. Jennings. With them were twenty &quot;boys&quot; from the
+Mission and, with each of them carrying a piece of our baggage on
+his head, we climbed the hill, and I was given a clean, comfortable,
+completely appointed bedroom. Our combined chop we turned over to a
+black brother. He is the custodian of the Rest House and an
+excellent cook. While he was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span>preparing it my boys spread out my
+folding rubber tub. Had I closed the door I should have smothered,
+so, in the presence of twenty interested black Baptists, I took an
+embarrassing but one of the most necessary baths I can remember.</p>
+
+<p>There still was a piece of the ice remaining, and as the interest in
+the bathtub had begun to drag I handed it to one of my audience. He
+yelled as though I had thrust into his hand a drop of vitriol, and,
+leaping in the air, threw the ice on the floor and dared any one to
+touch it. From the &quot;personal&quot; boys who had travelled to Matadi the
+Mission boys had heard of ice. But none had ever seen it. They
+approached it as we would a rattlesnake. Each touched it and then
+sprang away. Finally one, his eyes starting from his head,
+cautiously stroked the inoffensive brick and then licked his
+fingers. The effect was instantaneous. He assured the others it was
+&quot;good chop,&quot; and each of them sat hunched about it on his heels,
+stroking it, and licking his fingers, and then with delighted
+thrills rubbing them over his naked body. The little block of ice
+that at Liverpool was only a &quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span>quart of water&quot; had assumed the value
+of a diamond.</p>
+
+<p>Dinner was enlivened by an incident. Mr. Weekes, with orders simply
+to &quot;fry these,&quot; had given to the assistant of the cook two tins of
+sausages. The small <i>chef</i> presented them to us in the pan in which
+he had cooked them, but he had obeyed instructions to the letter and
+had fried the tins unopened.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner we sat until late, while the older men told the young
+missionaries of atrocities of which, in the twenty years and within
+the last three years, they had been witnesses. Already in Mr.
+Morel's books I had read their testimony, but hearing from the men
+themselves the tales of outrage and cruelty gave them a fresh and
+more intimate value, and sent me to bed hot and sick with
+indignation. But, nevertheless, the night I slept at Thysville was
+the only cool one I knew in the Congo. It was as cool as is a night
+in autumn at home. Thysville, between the Upper and the Lower Congo,
+with its fresh mountain air, is an obvious site for a hospital for
+the servants of the State. To the Congo it should be what <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span>Simla is
+to the sick men of India; but the State is not running hospitals. It
+is in the rubber business.</p>
+
+<p>All steamers for the Upper Congo and her great tributaries, whether
+they belong to the State or the Missions, start from Leopoldville.
+There they fit out for voyages, some of which last three and four
+months. So it is a place of importance, but, like Boma, it looks as
+though the people who yesterday built it meant to-morrow to move
+out. The river-front is one long dump-heap. It is a grave-yard for
+rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars. The interior of the
+principal storehouse for ships' supplies, directly in front of the
+office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old
+iron and newspapers. I should have enjoyed taking the captain of the
+port by the neck and showing him the water-front and marine shops at
+Calabar; the wharfs and quays of stone, the open places spread with
+gravel, the whitewashed cement gutters, the spare parts of
+machinery, greased and labeled in their proper shelves, even the
+condemned scrap-iron in orderly piles; the whole yard as trim as a
+battleship.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span>On the river-front at Leopoldville a grossly fat man, collarless,
+coatless, purple-faced, perspiring, was rushing up and down. He was
+the captain of the port. Black women had assembled to greet
+returning black soldiers, and the captain was calling upon the black
+sentries to drive them away. The sentries, yelling, fell upon the
+women with their six-foot staves and beat them over the head and
+bare shoulders, and as they fled, screaming, the captain of the port
+danced in the sun shaking his fists after them and raging violently.
+Next morning I was told he had tried to calm his nerves with
+absinthe, which is not particularly good for nerves, and was
+exceedingly unwell. I was sorry for him. The picture of discipline
+afforded by the glazed-eyed official, reeling and cursing in the
+open street, had been illuminating.</p>
+
+<p>Although at Leopoldville the State has failed to build wharfs, the
+esthetic features of the town have not been neglected, and there is
+a pretty plaza called Stanley Park. In the centre of this plaza is a
+pillar with, at its base, a bust of Leopold, and on the top of the
+pillar a plaster-of-Paris lady, nude, and, not unlike <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span>the
+Bacchante of MacMonnies. Not so much from the likeness as from
+history, I deduced that the lady must be Cl&eacute;o de M&eacute;rode. But whether
+the monument is erected to her or to Leopold, or to both of them, I
+do not know.</p>
+
+<a name="img10" id="img10"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 258px;">
+<img src="images/img-10.jpg" width="258" height="450" alt="The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+Stanley, but to Leopold." title= "The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+Stanley, but to Leopold." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+Stanley, but to Leopold. </p>
+
+<p>I left Leopoldville in the <i>Deliverance</i>. Some of the State boats
+that make the long trip to Stanleyville are very large ships. They
+have plenty of deck room and many cabins. With their flat, raft-like
+hull, their paddle-wheel astern, and the covered sun deck, they
+resemble gigantic house-boats. Of one of these boats the
+<i>Deliverance</i> was only one-third the size, but I took passage on her
+because she would give me a chance to see not only something of the
+Congo, but also one of its great tributaries, the less travelled
+Kasai. The <i>Deliverance</i> was about sixty-five feet over all and drew
+three feet of water. She was built like a mud-scow, with a deck of
+iron plates. Amidships, on this deck, was a tiny cabin with berths
+for two passengers and standing room for one. The furnaces and
+boiler were forward, banked by piles of wood. All the river boats
+burn only wood. Her engines were in the stern. These engines and the
+driving-rod <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span>to the paddle-wheel were uncovered. This gives the
+<i>Deliverance</i> the look of a large automobile without a tonneau. You
+were constantly wondering what had gone wrong with the carbureter,
+and if it rained what would happen to her engines. Supported on iron
+posts was an upper deck, on which, forward, stood the captain's box
+of a cabin and directly in front of it the steering-wheel. The
+telegraph, which signalled to the openwork engine below, and a
+dining table as small as a chess-board, completely filled the
+&quot;bridge.&quot; When we sat at table the captain's boy could only just
+squeeze himself between us and the rail. It was like dining in a
+private box. And certainly no theatre ever offered such scenery, nor
+did any menagerie ever present so many strange animals.</p>
+
+<p>We were four white men: Captain Jensen, his engineer, and the other
+passenger, Captain Anfossi, a young Italian. Before he reached his
+post he had to travel one month on the <i>Deliverance</i> and for another
+month walk through the jungle. He was the most cheerful and amusing
+companion, and had he been returning after three years of exile to
+his home <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span>he could not have been more brimful of spirits. Captain
+Jensen was a Dane (almost every river captain is a Swede or a Dane)
+and talked a little English, a little French, and a little Bangala.
+The mechanician was a Finn and talked the native Bangala, and
+Anfossi spoke French. After chop, when we were all assembled on the
+upper deck, there would be the most extraordinary talks in four
+languages, or we would appoint one man to act as a clearing-house,
+and he would translate for the others.</p>
+
+<p>On the lower deck we carried twenty &quot;wood boys,&quot; whose duty was to
+cut wood for the furnace, and about thirty black passengers. They
+were chiefly soldiers, who had finished their period of service for
+the State, with their wives and children. They were crowded on the
+top of the hatches into a space fifteen by fifteen feet between our
+cabin door and the furnace. Around the combings of the hatches, and
+where the scuppers would have been had the <i>Deliverance</i> had
+scuppers, the river raced over the deck to a depth of four or five
+inches. When the passengers wanted to wash their few clothes or
+themselves they carried on their ablutions and laundry work where
+they happened <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span>to be sitting. But for Anfossi and myself to go from
+our cabin to the iron ladder of the bridge it was necessary to wade
+both in the water and to make stepping stones of the passengers. I
+do not mean that we merely stepped over an occasional arm or leg. I
+mean we walked on them. You have seen a football player, in a hurry
+to make a touchdown, hurdle without prejudice both friends and foes.
+Our progress was like this. But by practice we became so expert that
+without even awakening them we could spring lightly from the plump
+stomach of a black baby to its mother's shoulder, from there leap to
+the father's ribs, and rebound upon the rungs of the ladder.</p>
+
+<a name="img11" id="img11"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-11.jpg" width="500" height="318" alt="The Deliverance." title="The Deliverance." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The <i>Deliverance</i>. </p>
+
+<p>The river marched to the sea at the rate of four to five miles an
+hour. The <i>Deliverance</i> could make about nine knots an hour, so we
+travelled at the average rate of five miles; but for the greater
+part of each day we were tied to a bank while the boys went ashore
+and cut enough wood to carry us farther. And we never travelled at
+night. Owing to the changing currents, before the sun set we ran
+into shore and made fast to a tree. I explained how in America the
+river boats used search-lights, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span>and was told that on one boat the
+State had experimented with a searchlight, but that particular
+searchlight having got out of order the idea of night travelling was
+condemned.</p>
+
+<p>Ours was a most lazy progress, but one with the most beautiful
+surroundings and filled with entertainment. From our private box we
+looked out upon the most wonderful of panoramas. Sometimes we were
+closely hemmed in by mountains of light-green grass, except where,
+in the hollows, streams tumbled in tiny waterfalls between gigantic
+trees hung with strange flowering vines and orchids. Or we would
+push into great lakes of swirling brown water, dotted with flat
+islands overgrown with reed grass higher than the head of a man.
+Again the water turned blue and the trees on the banks grew into
+forests with the look of cultivated, well-cared-for parks, but with
+no sign of man, not even a mud hut or a canoe; only the strangest of
+birds and the great river beasts. Sometimes the sky was overcast and
+gray, the warm rain shut us in like a fog, and the clouds hid the
+peaks of the hills, or there would come a swift black tornado and
+the rain beat into our private box, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span>and each would sit crouched in
+his rain coat, while the engineer smothered his driving-rods in palm
+oil, and the great drops drummed down upon the awning and drowned
+the fire in our pipes. After these storms, as though it were being
+pushed up from below, the river seemed to rise in the centre, to
+become convex. By some optical illusion, it seemed to fall away on
+either hand to the depth of three or four feet.</p>
+
+<p>But as a rule we had a brilliant, gorgeous sunshine that made the
+eddying waters flash and sparkle, and caused the banks of sand to
+glare like whitewashed walls, and turn the sharp, hard fronds of the
+palms into glittering sword-blades. The movement of the boat
+tempered the heat, and in lazy content we sat in our lookout box and
+smiled upon the world. Except for the throb of the engine and the
+slow splash, splash, splash of the wheel there was no sound. We
+might have been adrift in the heart of a great ocean. So complete
+was the silence, so few were the sounds of man's presence, that at
+times one almost thought that ours was the first boat to disturb the
+Congo.</p>
+
+<p>Although we were travelling by boat, we <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span>spent as much time on land
+as on the water. Because the <i>Deliverance</i> burnt wood and, like an
+invading army, &quot;lived on the country,&quot; she was always stopping to
+lay in a supply. That gave Anfossi and myself a chance to visit the
+native villages or to hunt in the forest.</p>
+
+<p>To feed her steamers the State has established along the river-bank
+posts for wood, and in theory at these places there always is a
+sufficient supply of wood to carry a steamer to the next post. But
+our experience was either that another steamer had just taken all
+the wood or that the boys had decided to work no more and had hidden
+themselves in the bush. The State posts were &quot;clearings,&quot; less than
+one hundred yards square, cut out of the jungle. Sometimes only
+black men were in charge, but as a rule the <i>chef de poste</i> was a
+lonely, fever-ridden white, whose only interest in our arrival was
+his hope that we might spare him quinine. I think we gave away as
+many grains of quinine as we received logs of wood. Empty-handed we
+would turn from the wood post and steam a mile or so farther up the
+river, where we would run into a bank, and a boy with a steel hawser
+would leap overboard <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span>and tie up the boat to the roots of a tree.
+Then all the boys would disappear into the jungle and attack the
+primeval forest. Each was supplied with a machete and was expected
+to furnish a <i>bras</i> of wood. A <i>bras</i> is a number of sticks about as
+long and as thick as your arm, placed in a pile about three feet
+high and about three feet wide. To fix this measure the head boy
+drove poles into the bank three feet apart, and from pole to pole at
+the same distance from the ground stretched a strip of bark. When
+each boy had filled one of these openings all the wood was carried
+on board, and we would unhitch the <i>Deliverance</i>, and she would
+proceed to burn up the fuel we had just collected. It took the
+twenty boys about four hours to cut the wood, and the <i>Deliverance</i>
+the same amount of time to burn it. It was distinctly a
+hand-to-mouth existence. As I have pointed out, when it is too dark
+to see the currents, the Congo captains never attempt to travel. So
+each night at sunset Captain Jensen ran into the bank, and as soon
+as the plank was out all the black passengers and the crew passed
+down it and spent the night on shore. In five minutes the women
+would have <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span>the fires lighted and the men would be cutting grass
+for bedding and running up little shelters of palm boughs and
+hanging up linen strips that were both tents and mosquito nets.</p>
+
+<a name="img12" id="img12"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 290px;">
+<img src="images/img-12.jpg" width="290" height="450" alt="The Native Wife of a Chef de Poste."
+title="The Native Wife of a Chef de Poste." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Native Wife of a <i>Chef de Poste</i>. </p>
+
+<p>In the moonlight the natives with their camp-fires and torches made
+most wonderful pictures. Sometimes for their sleeping place the
+captain would select a glade in the jungle, or where a stream had
+cut a little opening in the forest, or a sandy island, with tall
+rushes on either side and the hot African moon shining on the white
+sand and turning the palms to silver, or they would pitch camp in a
+buffalo wallow, where the grass and mud had been trampled into a
+clay floor by the hoofs of hundreds of wild animals. But the fact
+that they were to sleep where at sunrise and at sunset came
+buffaloes, elephants, and panthers, disturbed the women not at all,
+and as they bent, laughing, over the iron pots, the firelight shone
+on their bare shoulders and was reflected from their white teeth and
+rolling eyes and brazen bangles.</p>
+
+<p>Until late in the night the goats would bleat, babies cry, and the
+&quot;boys&quot; and &quot;mammies&quot; talked, sang, quarrelled, beat tom-toms, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span>squeezed mournful groans out of the accordion of civilization. One
+would have thought we had anchored off a busy village rather than at
+a place where, before that night, the inhabitants had been only the
+beasts of the jungle and the river.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span>
+
+<h3>AMERICANS IN THE CONGO</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>In trying to sum up what I found in the Congo Free State, I think
+what one fails to find there is of the greatest significance. To
+tell what the place is like, you must tell what it lacks. One must
+write of the Congo always in the negative. It is as though you
+asked: &quot;What sort of a house is this one Jones has built?&quot; and were
+answered: &quot;Well, it hasn't any roof, and it hasn't any cellar, and
+it has no windows, floors, or chimneys. It's that kind of a house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When first I arrived in the Congo the time I could spend there
+seemed hopelessly inadequate. After I'd been there a month, it
+seemed to me that in a very few days any one could obtain a
+painfully correct idea of the place, and of the way it is
+administered. If an orchestra starts on an piece of music with all
+the instruments out of tune, it need not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span>play through the entire
+number for you to know that the instruments are out of tune.</p>
+
+<p>The charges brought against Leopold II, as King of the Congo, are
+three:</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) That he has made slaves of the twenty million blacks he
+promised to protect.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) That, in spite of his promise to keep the Congo open to trade,
+he has closed it to all nations.</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) That the revenues of the country and all of its trade he has
+retained for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Any one who visits the Congo and remains only two weeks will be
+convinced that of these charges Leopold is guilty. In that time he
+will not see atrocities, but he will see that the natives are
+slaves, that no foreigner can trade with them, that in the interest
+of Leopold alone the country is milked.</p>
+
+<p>He will see that the government of Leopold is not a government. It
+preserves the perquisites and outward signs of government. It coins
+money, issues stamps, collects taxes. But it assumes none of the
+responsibilities of government. The Congo Free State is only a great
+trading house. And in it Leopold is the only wholesale and retail
+trader. He gives a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span>bar of soap for rubber, and makes a &quot;turn-over&quot;
+of a cup of salt for ivory. He is not a monarch. He is a shopkeeper.</p>
+
+<p>And were the country not so rich in rubber and ivory, were the
+natives not sweated so severely, he also would be a bankrupt
+shopkeeper. For the Congo is not only one vast trading post, but
+also it is a trading post badly managed. Even in the republics of
+Central America where the government changes so frequently, and
+where each new president is trying to make hay while he can, there
+is better administration, more is done for the people, the rights of
+other nations are better respected.</p>
+
+<p>Were the Congo properly managed, it would be one of the richest
+territories on the surface of the earth. As it is, through ignorance
+and cupidity, it is being despoiled and its people are the most
+wretched of human beings. In the White Book containing the reports
+of British vice-consuls on conditions in the Congo from April of
+last year to January of this year, Mr. Mitchell tells how the
+enslavement of the people still continues, how &quot;they&quot; (the
+conscripts, as they are <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span>called) &quot;are hunted in the forest by
+soldiers, and brought in chained by the neck like criminals.&quot; They
+then, though conscripted to serve in the army, are set to manual
+labor. They are slaves. The difference between the slavery under
+Leopold and the slavery under the Arab raiders is that the Arab was
+the better and kinder master. He took &quot;prisoners&quot; just as Leopold
+seizes &quot;conscripts,&quot; but he had too much foresight to destroy whole
+villages, to carry off all the black man's live stock, and to uproot
+his vegetable gardens. He purposed to return. And he did not wish to
+so terrify the blacks that to escape from him they would penetrate
+farther into the jungle. His motive was purely selfish, but his
+methods, compared with those of Leopold, were almost considerate.
+The work the State to-day requires of the blacks is so oppressive
+that they have no time, no heart, to labor for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>In every other colony&mdash;French, English, German&mdash;in the native
+villages I saw vegetable gardens, goats, and chickens, large,
+comfortable, three-room huts, fences, and, especially in the German
+settlement of the Cameroons <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span>at Duala, many flower gardens. In Bell
+Town at Duala I walked for miles through streets lined with such
+huts and gardens, and saw whole families, the very old as well as
+the very young, sitting contentedly in the shade of their trees, or
+at work in their gardens. In the Congo native villages I saw but one
+old person, of chickens or goats that were not to be given to the
+government as taxes I saw none, and the vegetable gardens, when
+there were any such, were cultivated for the benefit of the <i>chef de
+poste</i>, and the huts were small, temporary, and filthy. The dogs in
+the kennels on my farm are better housed, better fed, and much
+better cared for, whether ill or well, than are the twenty millions
+of blacks along the Congo River. And that these human beings are so
+ill-treated is due absolutely to the cupidity of one man, and to the
+apathy of the rest of the world. And it is due as much to the apathy
+and indifference of whoever may read this as to the silence of Elihu
+Root or Sir Edward Grey. No one can shirk his responsibility by
+sneering, &quot;Am I my brother's keeper?&quot; The Government of the United
+States and the thirteen other countries have promised <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span>to protect
+these people, to care for their &quot;material and moral welfare,&quot; and
+that promise is morally binding upon the people of those countries.
+How much Leopold cares for the material welfare of the natives is
+illustrated by the prices he pays the &quot;boys&quot; who worked on the
+government steamer in which I went up the Kasai. They were bound on
+a three months' voyage, and for each month's work on this trip they
+were given in payment their rice and eighty cents. That is, at the
+end of the trip they received what in our money would be equivalent
+to two dollars and forty cents. And that they did not receive in
+money, but in &quot;trade goods,&quot; which are worth about ten per cent less
+than their money value. So that of the two dollars and eighty cents
+that is due them, these black boys, who for three months sweated in
+the dark jungle cutting wood, are robbed by this King of twenty-four
+cents. One would dislike to grow rich at that price.</p>
+
+<a name="img13" id="img13"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-13.jpg" width="500" height="318" alt="English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges."
+title="English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges. </p>
+
+<p>In the French Congo I asked the traders at Libreville what they paid
+their boys for cutting mahogany. I found the price was four francs a
+day without &quot;chop,&quot; or three and a half <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span>francs with &quot;chop.&quot; That
+is, on one side of the river the French pay in cash for one day's
+work what Leopold pays in trade goods for the work of a month. As a
+result the natives run away to the French side, and often, I might
+almost say invariably, when at the <i>poste de bois</i> on the Congo side
+we would find two cords of wood, on the other bank at the post for
+the French boats we would count two hundred and fifty cords of wood.
+I took photographs of the native villages in all the colonies, in
+order to show how they compared&mdash;of the French and Belgian wood
+posts, the one well stocked and with the boys lying about asleep or
+playing musical instruments, or alert to trade and barter, and on
+the Belgian side no wood, and the unhappy white man alone, and
+generally shivering with fever. Had the photographs only developed
+properly they would have shown much more convincingly than one can
+write how utterly miserable is the condition of the Congo negro. And
+the condition of the white man at the wood posts is only a little
+better. We found one man absolutely without supplies. He was only
+twenty-four hours distant from Leopoldville, but no <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span>supplies had
+been sent him. He was ill with fever, and he could eat nothing but
+milk. Captain Jensen had six cans of condensed milk, which the State
+calculated should suffice for him and his passengers for three
+months. He turned the lot over to the sick man.</p>
+
+<p>We found another white man at the first wood post on the Kasai just
+above where it meets the Congo. He was in bed and dangerously ill
+with enteric fever. He had telegraphed the State at Leopoldville and
+a box of medicines had been sent to him; but the State doctors had
+forgotten to enclose any directions for their use. We were as
+ignorant of medicines as the man himself, and, as it was impossible
+to move him, we were forced to leave him lying in his cot with the
+row of bottles and tiny boxes, that might have given him life,
+unopened at his elbow. It was ten days before the next boat would
+touch at his post. I do not know that it reached him in time. One
+could tell dozens of such stories of cruelty to natives and of
+injustice and neglect to the white agents.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that Leopold has granted to American syndicates control
+over two great <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span>territories in the Congo may bring about a better
+state of affairs, and, in any event, it may arouse public interest
+in this country. It certainly should be of interest to Americans
+that some of the most prominent of their countrymen have gone into
+close partnership with a speculator as unscrupulous and as notorious
+as is Leopold, and that they are to exploit a country which as yet
+has been developed only by the help of slavery, with all its
+attendant evils of cruelty and torture.</p>
+
+<p>That Leopold has no right to give these concessions is a matter
+which chiefly concerns the men who are to pay for them, but it is an
+interesting fact.</p>
+
+<p>The Act of Berlin expressly states: <i>&quot;No Power which exercises, or
+shall exercise, sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions,
+shall be allowed to grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in
+matters of trade.&quot;</i></p>
+
+<p>Leopold is only a steward placed by the Powers over the Congo. He is
+a janitor. And he has no more authority to give even a foot of
+territory to Belgians, Americans, or Chinamen than the janitor of an
+apartment house has authority to fill the rooms with his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span>wife's
+relations or sell the coal in the basement.</p>
+
+<p>The charge that the present concessionaires have no title that any
+independent trader or miner need respect is one that is sure to be
+brought up when the Powers throw Leopold out, and begin to clean
+house. The concessionaires take a sporting chance that Leopold will
+not be thrown out. It should be remembered that it is to his and to
+their advantage to see that he is not.</p>
+
+<p>In November of 1906, Leopold gave the International Forestry and
+Mining Company of the Congo mining rights in territories adjoining
+his private park, the <i>Domaine de la Couronne</i>, and to the American
+Congo Company he granted the right to work rubber along the Congo
+River to where it joins the Kasai. This latter is a territory of
+four thousand square miles. The company also has the option within
+the next eleven years of buying land in any part of a district which
+is nearly one-half of the entire Congo. Of the Forestry and Mining
+Company one-half of the profits go to Leopold, one-fourth to
+Belgians, and the remaining fourth to the Americans. Of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span>profits
+of the American Congo Company, Leopold is entitled to one-half and
+the Americans to the other half. This company was one originally
+organized to exploit a new method of manufacturing crude rubber from
+the plant. The company was taken over by Thomas F. Ryan and his
+associates. Back of both companies are the Guggenheims, who are to
+perform the actual work in the mines and in the rubber plantation.
+Early in March a large number of miners and engineers were selected
+by John Hays Hammond, the chief engineer of the Guggenheim
+Exploration Companies, and A. Chester Beatty, and were sent to
+explore the territory granted in the mining concession. Another
+force of experts are soon to follow. The legal representative of the
+syndicates has stated that in the Congo they intend to move &quot;on
+commercial lines.&quot; By that we take it they mean they will give the
+native a proper price for his labor; and instead of offering
+&quot;bonuses&quot; and &quot;commissions&quot; to their white employees will pay them
+living wages. The exact terms of the concessions are wrapped in
+mystery. Some say the territories ceded to the concessionaires <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span>are
+to be governed by them, policed by them, and that within the
+boundaries of these concessions the Americans are to have absolute
+control. If this be so the syndicates are entering upon an
+experiment which for Americans is almost without precedent. They
+will be virtually what in England is called a chartered company,
+with the difference that the Englishmen receive their charter from
+their own government, while the charter under which the Americans
+will act will be granted by a foreign Power, and for what they may
+do in the Congo their own government could not hold them
+responsible. They are answerable only to the Power that issued the
+charter; and that Power is the just, the humane, the merciful
+Leopold.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the early days of chartered companies in Africa,
+notoriously those of the Congo, Northern Nigeria, Rhodesia, and
+German Central Africa does not make pleasant reading. But until the
+Americans in the Congo have made this experiment, it would be most
+unfair (except that the company they choose to keep leaves them open
+to suspicion) not to give them the benefit of the doubt. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span>One can at
+least say for them that they seem to be absolutely ignorant of the
+difficulties that lie before them. At least that is true of all of
+them to whom I have talked.</p>
+
+<p>The attorney of the Rubber Company when interviewed by a
+representative of a New York paper is reported to have said: &quot;We
+have purchased a privilege from a Sovereign State and propose to
+operate it along purely commercial lines. With King Leopold's
+management of Congo affairs in the past, or, with <i>what he may do in
+an administrative way in the future, we have absolutely nothing to
+do</i>.&quot; The italics are mine.</p>
+
+<p>When asked: &quot;Under your concessions are you given similar powers
+over the native blacks as are enjoyed by other concessionaires?&quot; the
+answer of the attorney, as reported, was: &quot;The problem of labor is
+not mentioned in the concession agreement, neither is the question
+of local administration. We are left to solve the labor problem in
+our own way, on a purely commercial basis, and with the question of
+government we have absolutely nothing whatever to do. The labor
+problem will not be formidable. Our mills are simple affairs. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span>One
+man can manage them, and the question of the labor on the rubber
+concession is reduced to the minimum.&quot; This answer of the learned
+attorney shows an ignorance of &quot;labor&quot; conditions in the Congo which
+is, unless assumed, absolutely abject.</p>
+
+<p>If the American syndicates are not to police and govern the
+territories ceded them, but if these territories are to continue to
+be administered by Leopold, it is not possible for the Americans to
+have &quot;absolutely nothing to do&quot; with that administration. Leopold's
+sole idea of administration is that every black man is his slave, in
+other words, the only men the Americans can depend upon for labor
+are slaves. Of the profits of these American companies Leopold is to
+receive one-half. He will work his rubber with slaves.</p>
+
+<p>Are the Americans going to use slaves also, or do they intend &quot;on
+commercial lines&quot; to pay those who work for them living wages? And
+if they do, at the end of the fiscal year, having paid a fair price
+for labor, are they prepared to accept a smaller profit than will
+their partner Leopold, who obtains his labor with the aid of a chain
+and a whip?</p>
+
+<a name="img14" id="img14"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 287px;">
+<img src="images/img-14.jpg" width="287" height="450" alt="The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+Concessionaires Must Depend." title="The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+Concessionaires Must Depend." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+Concessionaires Must Depend. </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span>The attorney for the company airily says: &quot;The labor problem will
+not be formidable.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>If the man knows what he is talking about, he can mean but one
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>The motives that led Leopold to grant these concessions are possibly
+various. The motives that induced the Americans to take his offer
+were probably less complicated. With them it was no question of
+politics. They wanted the money; they did not need it, for they all
+are rich&mdash;they merely wanted it. But Leopold wants more than the
+half profits he will obtain from the Americans. If the Powers should
+wake from their apathy and try to cast him out of the Congo, he
+wants, through his American partners, the help of the United States.
+Should he be &quot;dethroned,&quot; by granting these concessions now on a
+share and share alike basis with Belgians, French, and Americans, he
+still, through them, hopes to draw from the Congo a fair income. And
+in the meanwhile he looks to these Americans to kill any action
+against him that may be taken in our Senate and House of
+Representatives, even in the White House and Department of State.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span>For the last two years Chester A. Beatty has been visiting Leopold
+at Belgium, and has obtained the two concessions, and Leopold has
+obtained, or hopes he has obtained, the influence of many American
+shareholders. The fact that the people of the United States
+possessed no &quot;vested interest&quot; in the Congo was the important fact
+that placed any action on our part in behalf of that distressed
+country above suspicion. If we acted, we did so because the United
+States, as one of the signatory Powers of the Berlin Act, had
+promised to protect the natives of the Congo; and we could truly
+claim that we acted only in the name of humanity. Leopold has now
+robbed us of that claim. He hopes that the enormous power wielded by
+the Americans with whom he is associated, will prevent any action
+against him in this country.</p>
+
+<p>But the deal has already been made public, and the motives of those
+who now oppose improvement of conditions in the Congo, and who
+support Leopold, will be at once suspected.</p>
+
+<p>To me the most interesting thing about the tract of land ceded to
+Mr. Ryan, apart from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span>the number of hippopotamuses I saw on it, was
+that the people living along the Congo say that it is of no value.
+They told me that two years ago, after working it for some time,
+Leopold abandoned it as unprofitable, and they added that, when
+Leopold cannot whip rubber out of the forest, it is hard to believe
+that it can be obtained there legitimately by any one else. On the
+bank I saw the &quot;factories&quot; to which the unprofitable rubber had been
+carried from the interior. They had formerly belonged to Leopold,
+now they are the property of Mr. Ryan and of the American Congo
+Company. In only two years they already are in ruins, and the jungle
+has engulfed them.</p>
+
+<p>I was on the land owned by the company a dozen times or more, but I
+did not go into the interior. Even had I done so, I am not an expert
+on rubber, and would have understood nothing of Para trees, Lagos
+silk, and liane. I am speaking not of my own knowledge, only of what
+was told me by people who live on the spot. I found that this
+particular concession was well known, because, unlike the land given
+to the Forestry and Mines <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span>Company, it is not an inaccessible tract,
+but is situated only eight miles from Leopoldville. In our language,
+that is about as far as is the Battery to 160th Street. Leopoldville
+is the chief place on the Congo River, and every one there who spoke
+to me of the concession knew where it was situated, and repeated
+that it had been given up by Leopold as unprofitable, and that he
+had unloaded it on Mr. Ryan. They seem to think it very clever of
+the King to have got rid of it to the American millionaire. To one
+knowing Mr. Ryan only from what he reads of him in the public press,
+he does not seem to be the sort of man to whom Leopold could sell a
+worthless rubber plantation. However, it is a matter which concerns
+only Mr. Ryan and those who may think of purchasing shares in the
+company. The Guggenheims, who are to operate this rubber, say that
+Leopold did not know how to get out the full value of the land, and
+that they, by using the machinery they will install, will be able to
+make a profit, where Leopold, using only native labor, suffered a
+loss.</p>
+
+<p>To the poor the ways of the truly rich are past finding out. After a
+man has attained a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span>fortune sufficient to keep him in yachts and
+automobiles, one would think he could afford to indulge himself in
+the luxury of being squeamish; that as to where he obtained any
+further increase of wealth, he would prefer to pick and choose.</p>
+
+<p>On the contrary, these Americans go as far out of their way as
+Belgium to make a partner of the man who has wrung his money from
+wretched slaves, who were beaten, starved, and driven in chains.
+This concession cannot make them rich. It can only make them richer.
+And not richer in fact, for all the money they may whip out of the
+Congo could not give them one thing that they cannot now command,
+not an extra taste to the lips, not a fresh sensation, not one added
+power for good. To them it can mean only a figure in ink on a page
+of a bank-book. But what suffering, what misery it may mean to the
+slaves who put it there! Why should men as rich as these elect to go
+into partnership with one who sweats his dollars out of the naked
+black? How really fine, how really wonderful it would be if these
+same men, working together, decided to set free these twenty million
+people&mdash;if, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span>instead of joining hands with Leopold, they would
+overthrow him and march into the Congo free men, without his chain
+around their ankles, and open it to the trade of the world, and give
+justice and a right to live and to work and to sell and buy to
+millions of miserable human beings. These Americans working together
+could do it. They could do it from Washington. Or five hundred men
+with two Maxim guns could do it. The &quot;kingdom&quot; of the Congo is only
+a house of cards. Five hundred filibusters could take Boma, proclaim
+the Congo open to the traders of the world, as the Act of Berlin
+declares it to be, and in a day make of Leopold the jest of Europe.
+They would only be taking possession of what has always belonged to
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
+They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty,
+or crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven
+by any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
+degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
+risking <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span>life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows,
+and for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great.
+They had the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity.
+One of them picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the
+wrist of his tunic, and said: &quot;Look, it is our badge of shame.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
+home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men
+and brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will,
+safe in their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard
+King.</p>
+
+<p>What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
+Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
+possible, a greater evil?</p>
+
+<p>E.R. Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the
+improvement of the Congo, has written: &quot;It is a little difficult to
+imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of
+Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in
+slave-driving. The trouble is that they probably know nothing about
+African <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span>conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his
+detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis
+that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere
+'laborers' for the white man's benefit, possessing no rights in land
+nor in the produce of the soil. If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are
+going to acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by
+'commercial methods,' we welcome their advent. But we would point
+out to them that, in such a case, they had better at once abandon
+all idea of three or four hundred per cent dividends with which the
+wily autocrat at Brussels has doubtless primed them. No such
+monstrous profits are to be acquired in tropical Africa under a
+trade system. If, on the other hand, the methods they are prepared
+to adopt are the methods King Leopold and his other concessionaires
+have adopted for the past thirteen years, devastation and
+destruction, and the raising of more large bodies of soldiers, are
+their essential accompaniments; and the widening of the area of the
+Congo hell is assured.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise
+good to that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span>unhappy country are that our country is represented at
+Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the
+person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual
+work of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the
+Guggenheims. They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as
+philanthropists and humanitarians of the common-sense type. Like
+other rich men of their race, they have given largely to charity and
+to assist those less fortunate than themselves.</p>
+
+<p>For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they
+have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it
+successfully. Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with
+fairness.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Why should you suppose,&quot; Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, &quot;that in
+the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly? In Mexico we found the
+natives ill-paid and ill-fed. We fed them and paid them well. Not
+from any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business. It is
+not good business to cut off a workman's hands or head. We are not
+ashamed of the way we have always treated <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span>our workmen, and in the
+Congo we are not going to spoil our record.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold,
+tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway
+to his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his
+agents might do there he could not possibly know. To this Mr.
+Guggenheim answered that &quot;Neither Leopold nor anyone else can
+dictate how we shall treat the native labor,&quot; that if his agents
+were cruel they would be instantly dismissed, and that for what
+occurred in the Congo on the land occupied by the American Congo
+Company his brothers and himself alone were responsible, and that
+they accepted that responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him
+into trouble, men of whose <i>dossiers</i> he is quite ignorant.</p>
+
+<p>From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several
+of his &quot;valets du roi,&quot; press agents, and tools, men who for years
+have been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the
+Americans, one, who is prominently <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span>exploited by the Belgians, had
+to leave Africa for theft.</p>
+
+<p>That Mr. Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the
+Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt. But that on
+Broadway, removed from the scene of operations in time some four to
+six months, and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can
+control the acts of his agents and his partners, remains to be
+proved. He is attacking a problem much more momentous than the
+handling of Mexican <i>peons</i> or Chinese coolies, and every step of
+the working out of this problem will be watched by the people of
+this country.</p>
+
+<p>And should they find that the example of the Belgian concessionaires
+in their treatment of the natives is being imitated by even one of
+the American Congo Company the people of this country will know it,
+and may the Lord have mercy on his soul!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span>
+
+<h3>HUNTING THE HIPPO</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Except once or twice in the Zoo, I never had seen a hippopotamus,
+and I was most anxious, before I left the Congo, to meet one. I
+wanted to look at him when he was free, and his own master, without
+iron bars or keepers; when he believed he was quite alone, and was
+enjoying his bath in peace and confidence. I also wanted to shoot
+him, and to hang in my ancestral halls his enormous head with the
+great jaws open and the inside of them painted pink and the small
+tusks hungrily protruding. I had this desire, in spite of the fact
+that for every hippo except the particular one whose head I coveted,
+I entertained the utmost good feeling.</p>
+
+<p>As a lad, among other beasts the hippopotamus had appealed to my
+imagination. Collectively, I had always looked upon them as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span>most
+charming people. They come of an ancient family. Two thousand four
+hundred years ago they were mentioned by Herodotus. And Herodotus to
+the animal kingdom is what Domesday Book is to the landed gentry. To
+exist beautifully for twenty-four hundred years without a single
+m&eacute;salliance, without having once stooped to trade, is certainly a
+strong title to nobility. Other animals by contact with man have
+become degraded. The lion, the &quot;King of Beasts,&quot; now rides a
+bicycle, and growls, as previously rehearsed, at the young woman in
+spangles, of whom he is secretly afraid. And the elephant, the
+monarch of the jungle, and of a family as ancient and noble as that
+of the hippopotamus, the monarch of the river, has become a beast of
+burden and works for his living. You can see him in Ph&oelig;nix Park
+dragging a road-roller, in Siam and India carrying logs, and at
+Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn. The
+royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.</p>
+
+<p>But, you never see a hippopotamus chained to a road-roller, or
+riding a bicycle. He is still the gentleman, the man of elegant
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span>leisure, the aristocrat of aristocrats, harming no one, and, in his
+ancestral river, living the simple life.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, I sought to kill him. At least, one of him, but only one.
+And, that I did not kill even one, while a bitter disappointment, is
+still a source of satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>In the Congo River we saw only two hippos, and both of them were
+dead. They had been shot from a steamer. If the hippo is killed in
+the water, it is impossible to recover the body at once. It sinks
+and does not rise, some say, for an hour, others say for seven
+hours. As in an hour the current may have carried the body four
+miles below where it sank, the steamer does not wait, and the
+destruction of the big beast is simple murder. There should be a law
+in the Congo to prevent their destruction, and, no doubt, if the
+State thought it could make a few francs out of protecting the
+hippo, as it makes many million francs by preserving the elephant,
+which it does for the ivory, such a law would exist. We soon saw
+many hippos, but although we could not persuade the only other
+passenger not to fire at them, there are a few hippos still alive in
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span>Congo. For, the only time the Captain and I were positive he
+hit anything, was when he fired over our heads and blew off the roof
+of the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>When first we saw the two dead hippos, one of them was turning and
+twisting so violently that we thought he was alive. But, as we drew
+near, we saw the strange convulsions were due to two enormous and
+ugly crocodiles, who were fiercely pulling at the body. Crocodiles
+being man-eaters, we had no feelings about shooting them, either in
+the water or up a tree; and I hope we hit them. In any event, after
+we fired the body drifted on in peace.</p>
+
+<p>On my return trip, going with the stream, when the boat covers about
+four times the distance she makes when steaming against it, I saw
+many hippos. In one day I counted sixty-nine. But on our way up the
+Congo, until we turned into the Kasai River, we saw none.</p>
+
+<p>So, on the first night we camped in the Kasai I had begun to think I
+never would see one, and I went ashore both skeptical and
+discouraged. We had stopped, not at a wood post, but at a place on
+the river's bank previously <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a>[122]</span>untouched by man, where there was a
+stretch of beach, and then a higher level with trees and tall
+grasses. Driven deep in this beach were the footprints of a large
+elephant. They looked as though some one had amused himself by
+sinking a bucket in the mud, and then pulling it out. For sixty
+yards I followed the holes and finally lost them in a confusion of
+other tracks. The place had been so trampled upon that it was beaten
+into a basin. It looked as though every animal in the Kasai had met
+there to hold a dance. There were the deep imprints of the hippos
+and the round foot of the elephant, with the marks of the big toes
+showing as clearly as though they had been scooped out of the mud
+with a trowel, the hoofs of buffalo as large as the shoe of a cart
+horse, and the arrow-like marks of the antelope, some in dainty
+little Vs, others measuring three inches across, and three inches
+from the base to the point. They came from every direction, down the
+bank and out of the river; and crossed and recrossed, and beneath
+the fresh prints that had been made that morning at sunrise, were
+those of days before rising up sharply out of the sun-dried clay,
+like <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a>[123]</span>bas-reliefs in stucco. I had gone ashore in a state of mind so
+skeptical that I was as surprised as Crusoe at the sight of
+footprints. It was as though the boy who did not believe in fairies
+suddenly stumbled upon them sliding down the moonbeams. One felt
+distinctly apologetic&mdash;as though uninvited he had pushed himself
+into a family gathering. At the same time there was the excitement
+of meeting in their own homes the strange peoples I had seen only in
+the springtime, when the circus comes to New York, in the basement
+of Madison Square Garden, where they are our pitiful prisoners,
+bruising their shoulders against bars. Here they were monarchs of
+all they surveyed. I was the intruder; and, looking down at the
+marks of the great paws and delicate hoofs, I felt as much out of
+place as would a grizzly bear in a Fifth Avenue club. And I behaved
+much as would the grizzly bear. I rushed back for my rifle intent on
+killing something.</p>
+
+<p>The sun had just set; the moon was shining faintly: it was the
+moment the beasts of the jungle came to the river to drink. Anfossi,
+although he had spent three years in the Congo and had three years'
+contract still to work out, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a>[124]</span>was as determined to kill something as
+was the tenderfoot from New York.</p>
+
+<p>Sixty yards from the stern of the <i>Deliverance</i> was the basin I had
+discovered; at an equal distance from her bow, a stream plunged into
+the river. Anfossi argued the hippos would prefer to drink the clear
+water of the stream, to the muddy water of the basin, and elected to
+watch at the stream. I carried a deck chair to the edge of my basin
+and placed it in the shadow of the trees. Anfossi went into our
+cabin for his rifle. At that exact moment a hippopotamus climbed
+leisurely out of the river and plunged into the stream. One of the
+soldiers on shore saw him and rushed for the boat. Anfossi sent my
+boy on the jump for me and, like a gentleman, waited until I had
+raced the sixty yards. But when we reached the stream there was
+nothing visible but the trampled grass and great holes in the mud
+and near us in the misty moonlight river something that puffed and
+blew slowly and luxuriously, as would any fat gentleman who had been
+forced to run for it. Had I followed Anfossi's judgment and gone
+along the bank sixty yards ahead, instead of sixty yards astern <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a>[125]</span>of
+the <i>Deliverance</i>, at the exact moment at which I sank into my deck
+chair, the hippo would have emerged at my feet. It is even betting
+as to which of us would have been the more scared.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, and for days after, we saw nothing but hippos. We saw
+them floating singly and in family groups, with generally four or
+five cows to one bull, and sometimes in front a baby hippo no larger
+than a calf, which the mother with her great bulk would push against
+the swift current, as you see a tugboat in the lee of a great liner.
+Once, what I thought was a spit of rocks suddenly tumbled apart and
+became twenty hippos, piled more or less on top of each other.
+During that one day, as they floated with the current, enjoying
+their afternoon's nap, we saw thirty-four. They impressed me as the
+most idle, and, therefore, the most aristocratic of animals. They
+toil not, neither do they spin; they had nothing to do but float in
+the warm water and the bright sunshine; their only effort was to
+open their enormous jaws and yawn luxuriously, in the pure content
+of living, in absolute boredom. They reminded you only of fat gouty
+old <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a>[126]</span>gentlemen, puffing and blowing in the pool at the Warm Springs.</p>
+
+<p>The next chance we had at one of them on shore came on our first
+evening in the Kasai just before sunset. Captain Jensen was steering
+for a flat island of sand and grass where he meant to tie up for the
+night. About fifty yards from the spot for which we were making, was
+the only tree on the island, and under it with his back to us, and
+leisurely eating the leaves of the lower branches, exactly as though
+he were waiting for us by appointment, was a big gray hippo. His
+back being toward us, we could not aim at his head, and he could not
+see us. But the <i>Deliverance</i> is not noiseless, and, hearing the
+paddle-wheel, the hippo turned, saw us, and bolted for the river.
+The hippopotamus is as much at home in the water as the seal. To get
+to the water, if he is surprised out of it, and to get under it, if
+he is alarmed while in it, is instinct. If he does venture ashore,
+he goes only a few rods from the bank and then only to forage. His
+home is the river, and he rushes to bury himself in it as naturally
+as the squirrel makes for a tree. This particular hippo ran for the
+river as fast <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a>[127]</span>as a horse coming at a slow trot. He was a very badly
+scared hippo. His head was high in the air, his fat sides were
+shaking, and the one little eye turned toward us was filled with
+concern. Behind him the yellow sun was setting into the lagoons. On
+the flat stretch of sand he was the only object, and against the
+horizon loomed as large as a freight car. That must be why we both
+missed him. I tried to explain that the reason I missed him was
+that, never before having seen so large an animal running for his
+life, I could not watch him do it and look at the gun sights. No one
+believed that was why I missed him. I did not believe it myself. In
+any event neither of us hit his head, and he plunged down the bank
+to freedom, carrying most of the bank with him. But, while we still
+were violently blaming each other, at about two hundred yards below
+the boat, he again waddled out of the river and waded knee deep up
+the little stream. Keeping the bunches of grass between us, I ran up
+the beach, aimed at his eye and this time hit him fairly enough.
+With a snort he rose high in the air, and so, for an instant,
+balanced his enormous bulk. The action was like that of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a>[128]</span>a horse
+that rears on his hind legs, when he is whipped over the nose. And
+apparently my bullet hurt him no more than the whip the horse, for
+he dropped heavily to all fours, and again disappeared into the
+muddy river. Our disappointment and chagrin were intense, and at
+once Anfossi and I organized a hunt for that evening. To encourage
+us, while we were sitting on the bridge making a hasty dinner,
+another hippopotamus had the impertinence to rise, blowing like a
+whale, not ten feet from where we sat. We could have thrown our tin
+cups and hit him; but he was in the water, and now we were seeking
+only those on land.</p>
+
+<a name="img15" id="img15"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 324px;">
+<img src="images/img-15.jpg" width="324" height="450" alt="Mr. Davis and Native &quot;Boy,&quot; on the Kasai River."
+title="Mr. Davis and Native &quot;Boy,&quot; on the Kasai River." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Mr. Davis and Native &quot;Boy,&quot; on the Kasai River. </p>
+
+<p>Two years ago when the atrocities along the Kasai made the natives
+fear the white man and the white man fear the natives, each of the
+river boats was furnished with a stand of Albini rifles. Three of
+the black soldiers, who were keen sportsmen, were served with these
+muskets, and as soon as the moon rose, the soldiers and Anfossi, my
+black boy, with an extra gun, and I set forth to clear the island of
+hippos. To the stranger it was a most curious hunt. The island was
+perfectly flat and bare, and the river had eaten into it and
+overflowed it with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a>[129]</span>tiny rivulets and deep, swift-running streams.
+Into these rivulets and streams the soldiers plunged, one in front,
+feeling the depth of the water with a sounding rod, and as he led we
+followed. The black men made a splendid picture. They were naked but
+for breech-cloths, and the moonlight flashed on their wet skins and
+upon the polished barrels of the muskets. But, as a sporting
+proposition, as far as I could see, we had taken on the hippopotamus
+at his own game. We were supposed to be on an island, but the water
+was up to our belts and running at five miles an hour. I could not
+understand why we had not openly and aboveboard walked into the
+river. Wading waist high in the water with a salmon rod I could
+understand, but not swimming around in a river with a gun. The force
+of the shallowest stream was the force of the great river behind it,
+and wherever you put your foot, the current, on its race to the sea,
+annoyed at the impediment, washed the sand from under the sole of
+your foot and tugged at your knees and ankles. To add to the
+interest the three soldiers held their muskets at full cock, and as
+they staggered for a footing each pointed his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a>[130]</span>gun at me. There also
+was a strange fish about the size of an English sole that sprang out
+of the water and hurled himself through space. Each had a white
+belly, and as they skimmed past us in the moonlight it was as though
+some one was throwing dinner plates. After we had swum the length of
+the English Channel, we returned to the boat. As to that midnight
+hunt I am still uncertain as to whether we were hunting the hippos
+or the hippos were hunting us.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning we had our third and last chance at a hippo.</p>
+
+<p>It is distinctly a hard-luck story. We had just gone on the bridge
+for breakfast when we saw him walking slowly from us along an island
+of white sand as flat as your hand, and on which he loomed large as
+a haystack. Captain Jensen was a true sportsman. He jerked the bell
+to the engine-room, and at full speed the <i>Deliverance</i> raced for
+the shore. The hippo heard us, and, like a baseball player caught
+off base, tried to get back to the river. Captain Jensen danced on
+the deck plates:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Schoot it! schoot it!&quot; he yelled, &quot;Gotfurdamn! schoot it!&quot; When
+Anfossi and I fired, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a>[131]</span>the <i>Deliverance</i> was a hundred yards from the
+hippo, and the hippo was not five feet from the bank. In another
+instant, he would have been over it and safe. But when we fired, he
+went down as suddenly as though a safe had dropped on him. Except
+that he raised his head, and rolled it from side to side, he
+remained perfectly still. From his actions, or lack of actions, it
+looked as though one of the bullets had broken his back; and when
+the blacks saw he could not move they leaped and danced and
+shrieked. To them the death of the big beast promised much chop.</p>
+
+<p>But Captain Jensen was not so confident. &quot;Schoot it,&quot; he continued
+to shout, &quot;we lose him yet! Gotfurdamn! schoot it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My gun was an American magazine rifle, holding five cartridges. We
+now were very near the hippo, and I shot him in the head twice, and,
+once, when he opened them, in the jaws. At each shot his head would
+jerk with a quick toss of pain, and at the sight the blacks screamed
+with delight that was primitively savage. After the last shot, when
+Captain Jensen had brought the <i>Deliverance</i> broadside to the bank,
+the hippo ceased to move. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a>[132]</span>boat had not reached the shore before
+the boys with the steel hawser were in the water; the gangplank was
+run out, and the black soldiers and wood boys, with their knives,
+were dancing about the hippo and hacking at his tail. Their idea was
+to make him the more quickly bleed to death. I ran to the cabin for
+more cartridges. It seemed an absurd precaution. I was as sure I had
+the head of that hippo as I was sure that my own was still on my
+neck. My only difficulty was whether to hang the head in the front
+hall or in the dining-room. It might be rather too large for the
+dining-room. That was all that troubled me. After three minutes,
+when I was back on deck, the hippo still lay immovable. Certainly
+twenty men were standing about him; three were sawing off his tail,
+and the women were chanting triumphantly a song they used to sing in
+the days when the men were allowed to hunt, and had returned
+successful with food.</p>
+
+<p>On the bridge was Anfossi with his camera. Before the men had
+surrounded the hippo he had had time to snap one picture of it. I
+had just started after my camera, when from the blacks there was a
+yell of alarm, of rage, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a>[133]</span>amazement. The hippo had opened his
+eyes and raised his head. I shoved the boys out of the way, and,
+putting the gun close to his head, fired pointblank. I wanted to put
+him out of pain. I need not have distressed myself. The bullet
+affected him no more than a quinine pill. What seemed chiefly to
+concern him, what apparently had brought him back to life, was the
+hacking at his tail. That was an indignity he could not brook.</p>
+
+<p>His expression, and he had a perfectly human expression, was one of
+extreme annoyance and of some slight alarm, as though he were
+muttering: &quot;This is no place for <i>me</i>,&quot; and, without more ado, he
+began to roll toward the river. Without killing some one, I could
+not again use the rifle. The boys were close upon him, prying him
+back with the gangplank, beating him with sticks of firewood, trying
+to rope him with the steel hawser. On the bridge Captain Jensen and
+Anfossi were giving orders in Danish and Italian, and on the bank I
+swore in American. Everybody shoved and pushed and beat at the great
+bulk, and the great bulk rolled steadily on. We might as well have
+tried to budge the Fifth Avenue <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a>[134]</span>Hotel. He reached the bank, he
+crushed it beneath him, and, like a suspension bridge, splashed into
+the water. Even then, we who watched him thought he would stick fast
+between the boat and the bank, that the hawser would hold him. But
+he sank like a submarine, and we stood gaping at the muddy water and
+saw him no more. When I recovered from my first rage I was glad he
+was still alive to float in the sun and puff and blow and open his
+great jaws in a luxurious yawn. I could imagine his joining his
+friends after his meeting with us, and remarking in reference to our
+bullets: &quot;I find the mosquitoes are quite bad this morning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With this chapter is published the photograph Anfossi took, from the
+deck of the steamer, of our hippo&mdash;the hippo that was too stupid to
+know when he was dead. It is not a good photograph, but of our hippo
+it is all we have to show. I am still undecided whether to hang it
+in the hall or the dining-room.
+</p>
+
+<a name="img16" id="img16"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-16.jpg" width="500" height="345" alt="The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead."
+title="The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead. </p>
+
+<p>The days I spent on my trip up the river were of delightful
+sameness, sunshine by day, with the great panorama drifting past,
+and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a>[135]</span>quiet nights of moonlight. For diversion, there were many
+hippos, crocodiles, and monkeys, and, though we saw only their
+tracks and heard them only in the jungle, great elephants. And
+innumerable strange birds&mdash;egrets, eagles, gray parrots, crimson
+cranes, and giant flamingoes&mdash;as tall as a man and from tip to tip
+measuring eight feet.</p>
+
+<p>Each day the programme was the same. The arrival at the wood post,
+where we were given only excuses and no wood, and where once or
+twice we unloaded blue cloth and bags of salt, which is the currency
+of the Upper Congo, and the halt for hours to cut wood in the
+forest.</p>
+
+<p>Once we stopped at a mission and noted the contrast it made with the
+bare, unkempt posts of the State. It was the Catholic mission at
+Wombali, and it was a beauty spot of flowers, thatched houses,
+grass, and vegetables. There was a brickyard, and schools, and
+sewing-machines, and the blacks, instead of scowling at us, nodded
+and smiled and looked happy and contented. The Father was a great
+red-bearded giant, who seemed to have still stored up in him all the
+energy of the North. While <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a>[136]</span>the steamer was unloaded he raced me
+over the vegetable garden and showed me his farm. I had seen other
+of the Catholic Missions, and I spoke of how well they looked, of
+the signs they gave of hard work, and of consideration for the
+blacks.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am not of that Order,&quot; the Father said gravely. He was speaking
+in English, and added, as though he expected some one to resent it:
+&quot;We are Jesuits.&quot; No one resented it, and he added: &quot;We have our
+Order in your country. Do you know Fordham College?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Did I know it? If you are trying to find our farm, the automobile
+book tells you to leave Fordham College on your left after Jerome
+Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Of course, I know it,&quot; I said. &quot;They have one of the best baseball
+nines near New York; they play the Giants every spring.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Father started.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They play with Giants!&quot; he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>I did not know how to say &quot;baseball nines&quot; in French, but at least
+he was assured that whatever it was, it was one of the best near New
+York.</p>
+
+<p>Then Captain Jensen's little black boy ran <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a>[137]</span>up to tell me the
+steamer was waiting, and began in Bangalese to beg something of the
+Father. The priest smiled and left us, returning with a rosary and
+crucifix, which the boy hung round his neck, and then knelt, and the
+red-bearded Father laid his fingers on the boy's kinky head. He was
+a very happy boy over his new possession, and it was much coveted by
+all the others. One of the black mammies, to ward off evil from the
+little naked baby at her breast, offered an arm's length of blue
+cloth for &quot;the White Man's fetish.&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img17" id="img17"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-17.jpg" width="500" height="304" alt="The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission."
+title="The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission. </p>
+
+<p>My voyage up the Kasai ended at Dima, the headquarters of the Kasai
+Concession. I had been told that at Dima I would find a rubber
+plantation, and I had gone there to see it. I found that the
+plantation was four days distant, and that the boat for the
+plantation did not start for six days. I also had been told by the
+English missionaries at Dima, that I would find an American mission.
+When I reached Dima I learned that the American mission was at a
+station further up the river, which could not be reached sooner than
+a month. That is the sort of information upon which in the Congo
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a>[138]</span>one is forced to regulate his movements. As there was at Dima
+neither mission nor plantation, and as the only boat that would
+leave it in ten days was departing the next morning, I remained
+there only one night. It was a place cut out of the jungle, two
+hundred yards square, and of all stations I saw in the Congo, the
+best managed. It is the repair shop for the steamers belonging to
+the Kasai Concession, as well as the headquarters of the company and
+the residence of the director, M. Dryepoint. He and Van Damme seemed
+to be the most popular officials in the Congo. M. Dryepoint was up
+the river, so I did not meet him, but I was most courteously and
+hospitably entertained by M. Fumi&egrave;re. He gave me a whole house to
+myself, and personally showed me over his small kingdom. All the
+houses were of brick, and the paths and roads were covered with
+gravel and lined with flowers. Nothing in the Congo is more curious
+than this pretty town of suburban villas and orderly machine shops;
+with the muddy river for a street and the impenetrable jungle for a
+back yard. The home of the director at Dima is the proud boast of
+the entire Congo. And all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a>[139]</span>they say of it is true. It did have a
+billiard table and ice, and a piano, and M. Fumi&egrave;re invited me to
+join his friends at an excellent dinner. In furnishing this
+celebrated house, the idea had apparently been to place in it the
+things one would least expect to find in the jungle, or, without
+wishing to be ungracious, anywhere. So, although there are no women
+at Dima, there are great mirrors in brass frames, chandeliers of
+glass with festoons and pendants of glass, metal lamps with shades
+of every color, painted plaster statuettes and carved silk-covered
+chairs. In the red glow of the lamps, surrounded by these Belgian
+atrocities, M. Fumi&egrave;re sat down to the pianola. The heat of Africa
+filled the room; on one side we could have touched the jungle, on
+the other in the river the hippopotamus puffed and snorted. M.
+Fumi&egrave;re pulled out the stops, and upon the heat and silence of the
+night, floated the &quot;Evening Star,&quot; Mascagni's &quot;Intermezzo,&quot; and
+&quot;Chin-chin Chinaman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Next morning I left for Leopoldville in a boat much larger than the
+<i>Deliverance</i>, but with none of her cheer or good-fellowship. This
+boat was run by the black wife of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a>[140]</span>captain. Trailing her velvet
+gown, and cleaning her teeth with a stick of wood, she penetrated to
+every part of the steamer, making discipline impossible and driving
+the crew out of control.</p>
+
+<p>I was glad to escape at Kinchassa to the clean and homelike bungalow
+and beautiful gardens of the only Englishman still in the employ of
+the State, Mr. Cuthbert Malet, who gave me hospitably of his scanty
+store of &quot;Scotch,&quot; and, what was even more of a sacrifice, of his
+precious handful of eggs. A week later I was again in Boma, waiting
+for the <i>Nigeria</i> to take me back to Liverpool.</p>
+
+<p>Before returning to the West Coast and leaving the subject of the
+Congo, I wish to testify to what seemed to me the enormously
+important work that is being done by the missionaries. I am not
+always an admirer of the missionary. Some of those one meets in
+China and Japan seem to be taking much more interest in their own
+bodies than in the souls of others. But, in the Congo, almost the
+only people who are working in behalf of the natives are those
+attached to the missions. Because they bear witness against Leopold,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a>[141]</span>much is said by his hired men and press agents against them. But
+they are deserving of great praise. Some of them are narrow and
+bigoted, and one could wish they were much more tolerant of their
+white brothers in exile, but compared with the good they do, these
+faults count for nothing. It is due to them that Europe and the
+United States know the truth about the Congo. They were the first to
+bear witness, and the hazardous work they still are doing for their
+fellow men is honest, practical Christianity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a>[142]</span>
+
+<h3>OLD CALABAR</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>While I was up the Congo and the Kasai rivers, Mrs. Davis had
+remained at Boma, and when I rejoined her, we booked passage home on
+the <i>Nigeria</i>. We chose the <i>Nigeria</i>, which is an Elder-Dempster
+freight and passenger steamer, in preference to the fast mail
+steamer because of the ports of the West Coast we wished to see as
+many as possible. And, on her six weeks' voyage to Liverpool, the
+<i>Nigeria</i> promised to spend as much time at anchor as at sea. On the
+Coast it is a more serious matter to reserve a cabin than in New
+York. You do not stop at an uptown office, and on a diagram of the
+ship's insides, as though you were playing roulette, point at a
+number. Instead, as you are to occupy your cabin, not for one, but
+for six, weeks, you search, as vigilantly as a navy officer looking
+for contraband, the ship herself and each cabin.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a>[143]</span>But going aboard was a simple ceremony. The H&ocirc;tel Splendide stands
+on the bank of the Congo River. After saying &quot;Good-by&quot; to her
+proprietor, I walked to the edge of the water and waved my helmet.
+In the Congo, a white man standing in the sun without a hat is a
+spectacle sufficiently thrilling to excite the attention of all, and
+at once Captain Hughes of the <i>Nigeria</i> sent a cargo boat to the
+rescue, and on the shoulders of naked Kroo boys Mrs. Davis and the
+maid, and the trunks, spears, tents, bathtubs, carved idols, native
+mats, and a live mongoos were dropped into it, and we were paddled
+to the gangway.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If that's all, we might as well get under way,&quot; said Captain
+Hughes. The anchor chains creaked, from the bank the proprietor of
+the Splendide waved his hand, and the long voyage to Liverpool had
+begun. It was as casual as halting and starting a cable-car.</p>
+
+<p>According to schedule, after leaving the Congo, we should have gone
+south and touched at Loanda. But on this voyage, outward bound, the
+<i>Nigeria</i> had carried, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a>[144]</span>to help build the railroad at Lobito Bay, a
+deckload of camels. They had proved trying passengers, and instead
+of first touching at the Congo, Captain Hughes had continued on
+south and put them ashore. So we were robbed of seeing both Loanda
+and the camels.</p>
+
+<p>This line, until Calabar is reached, carries but few passengers,
+and, except to receive cargo, the ship is not fully in commission.
+During this first week she is painted, and holystoned, her carpets
+are beaten, her cabins scrubbed and aired, and the passengers mess
+with the officers. So, of the ship's life, we acquired an intimate
+knowledge, her interests became our own, and the necessity of
+feeding her gaping holds with cargo was personal and acute. On a
+transatlantic steamer, when once the hatches are down, the captain
+need think only of navigation; on these coasters, the hatches never
+are down, and the captain, that sort of captain dear to the heart of
+the owners, is the man who fills the holds.</p>
+
+<p>A skipper going ashore to drum up trade was a novel spectacle.
+Imagine the captain of one of the Atlantic greyhounds prying among
+the warehouses on West Street, demanding of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span>the merchants:
+&quot;Anything going my way, this trip?&quot; He would scorn to do it. Before
+his passengers have passed the custom officers, he is in mufti, and
+on his way to his villa on Brooklyn Heights, or to the Lambs Club,
+and until the Blue Peter is again at the fore, little he cares for
+passengers, mails, or cargo. But the captain of a &quot;coaster&quot; must be
+sailor and trader, too. He is expected to navigate a coast, the
+latest chart of which is dated somewhere near 1830, and at which the
+waves rush in walls of spray, sometimes as high as a three-story
+house. He must speak all the known languages of Europe, and all the
+unknown tongues of innumerable black brothers. At each port he must
+entertain out of his own pocket the agents of all the trading
+houses, and, in his head, he must keep the market price, &quot;when laid
+down in Liverpool,&quot; of mahogany, copra, copal, rubber, palm oil, and
+ivory. To see that the agent has not overlooked a few bags of ground
+nuts, or a dozen puncheons of oil, he must go on shore and peer into
+the compound of each factory, and on board he must keep peace
+between the Kroo boys and the black deck passengers, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a>[146]</span>and see that
+the white passengers with a temperature of 105, do not drink more
+than is good for them. At least, those are a few of the duties the
+captains on the ships controlled by Sir Alfred Jones, who is Elder
+and Dempster, are expected to perform. No wonder Sir Alfred is
+popular.</p>
+
+<p>Our first port of call was Landana, in Portuguese territory, but two
+ships of the Woermann Line were there ahead of us and had gobbled up
+all the freight. So we could but up anchor and proceed to
+Libreville, formerly the capital of the French Congo. At five in the
+morning by the light of a ship's lantern, we were paddled ashore to
+drum up trade. We found two traders, Ives and Thomas, who had
+waiting for the <i>Nigeria</i> at the mouth of the Gabun River six
+hundred logs of mahogany, and, in consequence, there was general
+rejoicing, and Scotch and &quot;sparklets,&quot; and even music from a German
+music-box that would burst into song only after it had been fed with
+a copper. One of the clerks said that Ives had forgotten how to
+extract the coppers and in consequence was using the music-box as a
+savings bank.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a>[147]</span>In the French Congo the natives are permitted to trade; in the
+Congo Free State they are not, or, rather, they have nothing with
+which to trade, and the contrast between the empty &quot;factories&quot; of
+the Congo and those of Libreville, crowded with natives buying and
+selling, was remarkable. There also was a conspicuous difference in
+the quality and variety of the goods. In Leopold's Congo &quot;trade&quot;
+goods is a term of contempt. It describes articles manufactured only
+for those who have no choice and must accept whatever is offered.
+When your customers must take what you please to give them the
+quality of your goods is likely to deteriorate. Salt of the poorest
+grade, gaudy fabrics that neither &quot;wear&quot; nor &quot;wash,&quot; bars of coarse
+soap (the native is continually washing his single strip of cloth),
+and axe-heads made of iron, are what Leopold thinks are a fair
+exchange for the forced labor of the black.</p>
+
+<p>But the articles I found in the factories in Libreville were what,
+in the Congo, are called &quot;white man's goods&quot; and were of excellent
+quality and in great variety. There were even French novels and
+cigars. Some of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a>[148]</span>latter, called the Young American on account of
+the name and the flag on the lid, tempted me, until I saw they were
+manufactured by Dusseldorffer and Vanderswassen, and one suspected
+Rotterdam.</p>
+
+<p>In Ives's factory I saw for the first time a &quot;trade&quot; rifle, or Tower
+musket. In the vernacular of the Coast, they are &quot;gas-pipe&quot; guns.
+They are put together in England, and to a white man are a most
+terrifying weapon. The original Tower muskets, such as, in the days
+of '76, were hung over the fireplace of the forefathers of the Sons
+of the Revolution, were manufactured in England, and stamped with
+the word &quot;Tower,&quot; and for the reigning king G.R. I suppose at that
+date at the Tower of London there was an arsenal; but I am ready to
+be corrected. To-day the guns are manufactured at Birmingham, but
+they still have the flint lock, and still are stamped with the word
+&quot;Tower&quot; and the royal crown over the letters G.R., and with the
+arrow which is supposed to mark the property of the government. The
+barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore is that of an
+artesian well. The native fills four inches of this <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a>[149]</span>cavity with
+powder and the remaining three feet with rusty nails, barbed wire,
+leaden slugs, and the legs and broken parts of iron pots. An officer
+of the W.A.F.F.'s, in a fight in the bush in South Nigeria, had one
+of these things fired at him from a distance of fifteen feet. He
+told me all that saved him was that when the native pulled the
+trigger the recoil of the gun &quot;kicked&quot; the muzzle two feet in the
+air and the native ten feet into the bush. I bought a Tower rifle at
+the trade price, a pound, and brought it home. But although my
+friends have offered to back either end of the gun as being the more
+destructive, we have found no one with a sufficient sporting spirit
+to determine the point.</p>
+
+<p>Libreville is a very pretty town, but when it was laid out the
+surveyors just missed placing the Equator in its main street. It is
+easy to understand why with such a live wire in the vicinity
+Libreville is warm. From the same cause it also is rich in flowers,
+vines, and trees growing in generous, undisciplined abundance,
+making of Libreville one vast botanical garden, and burying the town
+and its bungalows <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a>[150]</span>under screens of green and branches of scarlet
+and purple flowers. Close to the surf runs an avenue bordered by
+giant cocoanut palms and, after the sun is down, this is the
+fashionable promenade. Here every evening may be seen in their
+freshest linen the six married white men of Libreville, and, in the
+latest Paris frocks, the six married ladies, while from the verandas
+of the factories that line the sea front and from under the paper
+lanterns of the Caf&eacute; Guion the clerks and traders sip their absinthe
+and play dominoes, and cast envious glances at the six fortunate
+fellow exiles.</p>
+
+<p>For several days we lay a few miles south of Libreville, off the
+mouth of the Gabun River, taking in the logs of mahogany. It was a
+continuous performance of the greatest interest. I still do not
+understand why all those engaged in it were not drowned, or pounded
+to a pulp. Just before we touched at the Gabun River, two tramp
+steamers, chartered by Americans, carried off a full cargo of this
+mahogany to the States. It was an experiment the result of which the
+traders of Libreville are awaiting with interest. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a>[151]</span>The mahogany that
+the reader sees in America probably comes from Hayti, Cuba, or
+Belize, and is of much finer quality than that of the Gabun River,
+which latter is used for making what the trade calls &quot;fancy&quot;
+cigar-boxes and cheap furniture. But before it becomes a cigar-box
+it passes through many adventures. Weeks before the steamer arrives
+the trader, followed by his black boys, explores the jungle and
+blazes the trees. Then the boys cut trails through the forest, and,
+using logs for rollers, drag and push the tree trunks to the bank of
+the river. There the tree is cut into huge cubes, weighing about a
+ton, and measuring twelve to fifteen feet in length and three feet
+across each face. A boy can &quot;shape&quot; one of these logs in a day.</p>
+
+<p>Although his pay varies according to whether the tributaries of the
+river are full or low, so making the moving of the logs easy or
+difficult, he can earn about three pounds ten shillings a month,
+paid in cash. Compared with the eighty cents a month paid only a few
+miles away in the Congo Free State, and in &quot;trade&quot; goods, these are
+good wages. When the log is shaped the mark of the trader is branded
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a>[152]</span>on it with an iron, just as we brand cattle, and it is turned loose
+on the river. At the mouth of the river there is little danger of
+the log escaping, for the waves are stronger than the tide, and
+drive the logs upon the shore. There, in the surf, we found these
+tons of mahogany pounding against each other. In the ship's
+steam-launch were iron chains, a hundred yards long, to which, at
+intervals, were fastened &quot;dogs,&quot; or spikes. These spikes were driven
+into the end of a log, the brand upon the log was noted by the
+captain and trader, and the logs, chained together like the vertebr&aelig;
+of a great sea serpent, were towed to the ship's side. There they
+were made fast, and three Kroo boys knocked the spike out of each
+log, warped a chain around it, and made fast that chain to the steel
+hawser of the winch. As it was drawn to the deck a Senegalese
+soldier, acting for the Customs, gave it a second blow with a
+branding hammer, and, thundering and smashing, it swung into the
+hold.</p>
+
+<a name="img18" id="img18"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 333px;">
+<img src="images/img-18.jpg" width="333" height="450" alt="There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+Pounding Against Each Other." title="There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+Pounding Against Each Other." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+Pounding Against Each Other. </p>
+
+<p>In the &quot;round up&quot; of the logs the star performers were the three
+Kroo boys at the ship's side. For days, in fascinated horror, the
+six passengers watched them, prayed for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a>[153]</span>them, and made bets as to
+which would be the first to die. One understands that a Kroo boy is
+as much at home in the sea as on shore, but these boys were neither
+in the sea nor on shore. They were balancing themselves on blocks of
+slippery wood that weighed a ton, but which were hurled about by the
+great waves as though they were life-belts. All night the hammering
+of the logs made the ship echo like a monster drum, and all day
+without an instant's pause each log reared and pitched, spun like a
+barrel, dived like a porpoise, or, broadside, battered itself
+against the iron plates. But, no matter what tricks it played, a
+Kroo boy rode it as easily as though it were a horse in a
+merry-go-round.</p>
+
+<p>It was a wonderful exhibition. It furnished all the thrills that one
+gets when watching a cowboy on a bucking bronco, or a trained seal.
+Again and again a log, in wicked conspiracy with another log, would
+plan to entice a Kroo boy between them, and smash him. At the sight
+the passengers would shriek a warning, the boy would dive between
+the logs, and a mass of twelve hundred pounds of mahogany would
+crash against a mass <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a>[154]</span>weighing fifteen hundred with a report like
+colliding freight cars.</p>
+
+<p>And then, as, breathless, we waited to see what once was a Kroo boy
+float to the surface, he would appear sputtering and grinning, and
+saying to us as clearly as a Kroo smile can say it: &quot;He never
+touched me!&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img19" id="img19"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 376px;">
+<img src="images/img-19.jpg" width="376" height="450" alt="A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains."
+title="A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains. </p>
+
+<p>Two days after we had stored away the mahogany we anchored off
+Duala, the capital of the German Cameroons. Duala is built upon a
+high cliff, and from the water the white and yellow buildings with
+many pillars gave it the appearance of a city. Instead, it is a
+clean, pretty town. With the German habit of order, it has been laid
+out like barracks, but with many gardens, well-kept, shaded streets,
+and high, cool houses, scientifically planned to meet the
+necessities of the tropics. At Duala the white traders and officials
+were plump and cheerful looking, and in the air there was more of
+prosperity than fever. The black and white sentry boxes and the
+native soldiers practising the stork march of the Kaiser's army were
+signs of a rigid military rule, but the signs of Germany's efforts
+in trade were more conspicuous. No<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a>[155]</span>where on the coast did we see as
+at Duala such gorgeous offices as those of the great trading house
+of Woermann, the hated rivals of &quot;Sir Alfred,&quot; such carved
+furniture, such shining brass railings, and nowhere else did we see
+plate-glass windows, in which, with unceasing wonder, the natives
+stared at reflections of their own persons. In the river there was a
+private dry dock of the Woermanns, and along the wharfs for acres
+was lumber for the Woermanns, boxes of trade goods, puncheons and
+casks for the Woermanns, private cooper shops and private machine
+shops and private banks for the Woermanns. The house flag of the
+Woermanns became as significant as that of a reigning sovereign. One
+felt inclined to salute it.</p>
+
+<p>The success of the German merchant on the East Coast and over all
+the world appears to be a question of character. He is patient,
+methodical, painstaking; it is his habit of industry that is helping
+him to close port after port to English, French, and American goods.
+The German clerks do not go to the East Coast or to China and South
+America to drink absinthe or whiskey, or to play dominoes or
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a>[156]</span>cricket. They work twice as long as do the other white men, and
+during those longer office hours they toil twice as hard. One of our
+passengers was a German agent returning for his vacation. I used to
+work in the smoking-room and he always was at the next table, also
+at work, on his ledgers and account books. He was so industrious
+that he bored me, and one day I asked him why, instead of spoiling
+his vacation with work, he had not balanced his books before he left
+the Coast.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It is an error,&quot; he said; &quot;I can not find him.&quot; And he explained
+that in the record of his three years' stewardship, which he was to
+turn over to the directors in Berlin, there was somewhere a mistake
+of a sixpence.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But,&quot; I protested, &quot;what's sixpence to you? You drink champagne all
+day. You begin at nine in the morning!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I drink champagne,&quot; said the clerk, &quot;because for three years I have
+myself alone in the bush lived, but, can I to my directors go with a
+book not balanced?&quot; He laid his hand upon his heart and shook his
+head. &quot;It is my heart that tells me 'No!'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After three weeks he gave a shout, his face <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a>[157]</span>blushed with pleasure,
+and actual tears were in his eyes. He had dug out the error, and at
+once he celebrated the recovery of the single sixpence by giving me
+twenty-four shillings' worth of champagne. It is a true story, and
+illustrates, I think, the training and method of the German mind, of
+the industry of the merchants who are trading over all the seas. As
+a rule the &quot;trade&quot; goods &quot;made in Germany&quot; are &quot;shoddy.&quot; They do not
+compare in quality with those of England or the States; in every
+foreign port you will find that the English linen is the best, that
+the American agricultural implements, American hardware, saws, axes,
+machetes, are superior to those manufactured in any other country.
+But the German, though his goods are poorer, cuts the coat to please
+the customer. He studies the wishes of the man who is to pay. He is
+not the one who says: &quot;Take it, or leave it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The agent of one of the largest English firms on the Ivory Coast,
+one that started by trading in slaves, said to me: &quot;Our largest
+shipment to this coast is gin. This is a French colony, and if the
+French traders and I were patriots instead of merchants we would
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a>[158]</span>buy from our own people, but we buy from the Germans, because trade
+follows no flag. They make a gin out of potatoes colored with rum or
+gin, and label it 'Demerara' and 'Jamaica.' They sell it to us on
+the wharf at Antwerp for ninepence a gallon, and we sell it at nine
+francs per dozen bottles. Germany is taking our trade from us
+because she undersells us, and because her merchants don't wait for
+trade to come to them, but go after it. Before the Woermann boat is
+due their agent here will come to my factory and spy out all I have
+in my compound. 'Why don't you ship those logs with us?' he'll ask.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Can't spare the boys to carry them to the beach,' I'll say.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'I'll furnish the boys,' he'll answer. That's the German way.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Elder-Dempster boats lie three miles out at sea and blow a
+whistle at us. They act as though by carrying our freight they were
+doing us a favor. These German ships, to save you the long pull,
+anchor close to the beach and lend you their own shore boats and
+their own boys to work your cargo. And if you give them a few tons
+to carry, like as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a>[159]</span>not they'll 'dash' you to a case of 'fizz.' And
+meanwhile the English captain is lying outside the bar tooting his
+whistle and wanting to know if you think he's going to run his ship
+aground for a few bags of rotten kernels. And he can't see, and the
+people at home can't see, why the Germans are crowding us off the
+Coast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Just outside of Duala, in the native village of Bell Town, is the
+palace and the harem of the ruler of the tribe that gave its name to
+the country, Mango Bell, King of the Cameroons. His brother, Prince
+William, sells photographs and &quot;souvenirs.&quot; We bought photographs,
+and on the strength of that hinted at a presentation at court.
+Brother William seemed doubtful, so we bought enough postal cards to
+establish us as <i>&eacute;trangers de distinction</i>, and he sent up our
+names. With Pivani, Hatton &amp; Cookson's chief clerk we were escorted
+to the royal presence. The palace is a fantastic, pagoda-like
+building of three stories; and furnished with many mirrors, carved
+oak sideboards, and lamp-shades of colored glass. Mango Bell, King
+of the Cameroons, sounds like a character in a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a>[160]</span>comic opera, but the
+king was an extremely serious, tall, handsome, and self-respecting
+negro. Having been educated in England, he spoke much more correct
+English than any of us. Of the few &quot;Kings I Have Met,&quot; both tame and
+wild, his manners were the most charming. Back of the palace is an
+enormously long building under one roof. Here live his thirty-five
+queens. To them we were not presented.</p>
+
+<a name="img20" id="img20"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-20.jpg" width="500" height="394" alt="The Palace of the King of the Cameroons."
+title="The Palace of the King of the Cameroons." /></div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Palace of the King of the Cameroons. </p>
+
+<p>Prince William asked me if I knew where in America there was a
+street called Fifth Avenue. I suggested New York. He referred to a
+large Bible, and finding, much to his surprise, that my guess was
+correct, commissioned me to buy him, from a firm on that street,
+just such another Bible as the one in his hand. He forgot to give me
+the money to pay for it, but loaned us a half-dozen little princes
+to bear our purchases to the wharf. For this service their royal
+highnesses graciously condescended to receive a small &quot;dash,&quot; and
+with the chief clerk were especially delighted. He, being a
+sleight-of-hand artist, apparently took five-franc pieces out of
+their Sunday clothes and from their kinky hair. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a>[161]</span>When we left they
+were rapidly disrobing to find if any more five-franc pieces were
+concealed about their persons.</p>
+
+<p>The morning after we sailed from Duala we anchored in the river in
+front of Calabar, the capital of Southern Nigeria. Of all the ports
+at which we touched on the Coast, Calabar was the hottest, the best
+looking, and the best administered. It is a model colony, but to
+bring it to the state it now enjoys has cost sums of money entirely
+out of proportion to those the colony has earned. The money has been
+spent in cutting down the jungle, filling in swamps that breed
+mosquitoes and fever, and in laying out gravel walks, water mains,
+and open cement gutters, and in erecting model hospitals, barracks,
+and administrative offices. Even grass has been made to grow, and
+the high bluff upon which are situated the homes of the white
+officials and Government House has been trimmed and cultivated and
+tamed until it looks like an English park. It is a complete
+imitation, even to golf links and tennis courts. But the fight that
+has been made against the jungle has not stopped with golf links. In
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a>[162]</span>1896 the death rate was ten men out of every hundred. That
+corresponds to what in warfare is a decimating fire, upon which an
+officer, without danger of reproof, may withdraw his men. But at
+Calabar the English doctors did not withdraw, and now the death rate
+is as low as three out of every hundred. That Calabar, or any part
+of the West Coast, will ever be made entirely healthy is doubtful.
+Man can cut down a forest and fill in a swamp, but he can not reach
+up, as to a gas jet, and turn off the sun. And at Calabar, even at
+night when the sun has turned itself off, the humidity and the heat
+leave one sweating, tossing, and gasping for air. In Calabar the
+first thing a white man learns is not to take any liberties with the
+sun. When he dresses, eats, drinks, and moves about the sun is as
+constantly on his mind, as it is on the face of the sun-dial. The
+chief ascent to the top of the bluff where the white people live is
+up a steep cement walk about eighty yards long. At the foot of this
+a white man will be met by four hammock-bearers, and you will see
+him get into the hammock and be carried in it the eighty yards.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a>[163]</span>For even that short distance he is taking no chances. But while he
+nurses his vitality and cares for his health he does not use the sun
+as an excuse for laziness or for slipshod work. I have never seen a
+place in the tropics where, in spite of the handicap of damp, fierce
+heat, the officers and civil officials are so keenly and constantly
+employed, where the bright work was so bright, and the whitewash so
+white.</p>
+
+<p>Out at the barracks of the West African Frontier Force, the
+W.A.F.F.'s, the officers, instead of from the shade of the veranda
+watching the non-coms. teach a native the manual, were themselves at
+work, and each was howling orders at the black recruits and smashing
+a gun against his hip and shoulder as smartly as a drill sergeant. I
+found the standard maintained at Calabar the more interesting
+because the men were almost entirely their own audience. If they
+make the place healthy, and attractive-looking, and dress for
+dinner, and shy at cocktails, and insist that their tan shoes shall
+glow like meershaum pipes, it is not because of the refining
+presence of lovely women, but because the men themselves like things
+that way. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a>[164]</span>The men of Calabar have learned that when the sun is at
+110, morals, like material things, disintegrate, and that, though
+the temptation is to go about in bath-room slippers and pajamas, one
+is wiser to bolster up his drenched and drooping spirit with a stiff
+shirt front and a mess jacket. They tell that in a bush station in
+upper Nigeria, one officer got his D.S.O. because with an audience
+of only a white sergeant he persisted in a habit of shaving twice a
+day.</p>
+
+
+<a name="img21" id="img21"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-21.jpg" width="500" height="326" alt="The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell."
+title="The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell. </p>
+
+<p>There are very few women in Calabar. There are three or four who are
+wives of officials, two nurses employed by the government, and the
+Mother Superior and Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph, and, of
+course, all of them are great belles. For the Sisters, especially
+the officers, the government people, the traders, the natives, even
+the rival missionaries, have the most tremendous respect and
+admiration. The sacrifice of the woman who, to be near her husband
+on the Coast, consents to sicken and fade and grow old before her
+time, and of the nurse who, to preserve the health of others, risks
+her own, is very great; but the sacrifice of the Sisters, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a>[165]</span>who have
+renounced all thought of home and husband, and who have exiled
+themselves to this steaming swamp-land, seems the most unselfish. In
+order to support the 150 little black boys and girls who are at
+school at the mission, the Sisters rob themselves of everything
+except the little that will keep them alive. Two, in addition to
+their work at the mission, act as nurses in the English hospital,
+and for that they receive together $600. This forms the sole regular
+income of the five women; for each $120 a year. With anything else
+that is given them in charity, they buy supplies for the little
+converts. They live in a house of sandstone and zinc that holds the
+heat like a flat-iron, they are obliged to wear a uniform that is of
+material and fashion so unsuited to the tropics that Dr. Chichester,
+in charge of the hospital, has written in protest against it to
+Rome, and on many days they fast, not because the Church bids them
+so to do, but because they have no food. And with it all, these five
+gentlewomen are always eager, cheerful, sweet of temper, and a
+living blessing to all who meet them. What now troubles them is that
+they have no room to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a>[166]</span>accommodate the many young heathen who come to
+them to be taught to wear clothes, and to be good little boys and
+girls. This is causing the Sisters great distress. Any one who does
+not believe in that selfish theory, that charity begins at home, but
+who would like to help to spread Christianity in darkest Africa and
+give happiness to five noble women, who are giving their lives for
+others, should send a postal money order to Marie T. Martin, the
+Reverend Mother Superior of the Catholic Mission of Old Calabar,
+Southern Nigeria.</p>
+
+<p>And if you are going to do it, as they say in the advertising pages,
+&quot;Do it now!&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img22" id="img22"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-22.jpg" width="500" height="320" alt="The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+Their Converts at Old Calabar." title= "The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+Their Converts at Old Calabar." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+Their Converts at Old Calabar. </p>
+
+<p>At Calabar there is a royal prisoner, the King of Benin. He is not
+an agreeable king like His Majesty of the Cameroons, but a grossly
+fat, sensual-looking young man, who, a few years ago, when he was at
+war with the English, made &quot;ju ju&quot; against them by sacrificing three
+hundred maidens, his idea being that the ju ju would drive the
+English out of Benin. It was poor ju ju, for it drove the young man
+himself out of Benin, and now he is a king in exile. As far as I
+could see, the social position of the king is insecure, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a>[167]</span>certainly in Calabar he does not move in the first circles. One
+afternoon, when the four or five ladies of Calabar and Mr. Bedwell,
+the Acting Commissioner, and the officers of the W.A.F.F.'s were at
+the clubhouse having ice-drinks, the king at the head of a retinue
+of cabinet officers, high priests, and wives bore down upon the
+club-house with the evident intention of inviting himself to tea.
+Personally, I should like to have met a young man who could murder
+three hundred girls and worry over it so little that he had not lost
+one of his three hundred pounds, but the others were considerably
+annoyed and sent an A.D.C. to tell him to &quot;Move on!&quot; as though he
+were an organ-grinder, or a performing bear.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;These kings,&quot; exclaimed a subaltern of the W.A.F.F.'s, indignantly,
+&quot;are trying to push in everywhere!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When we departed from Calabar, the only thing that reconciled me to
+leaving it and its charming people, was the fact that when the ship
+moved there was a breeze. While at anchor in the river I had found
+that not being able to breathe by day or to sleep by night in time
+is trying, even to the stoutest constitution.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a>[168]</span>One of the married ladies of Calabar, her husband, an officer of
+the W.A.F.F.'s, and the captain of the police sailed on the
+<i>Nigeria</i> &quot;on leave,&quot; and all Calabar came down to do them honor.
+There was the commissioner's gig, and the marine captain's gig, and
+the police captain's gig, and the gig from &quot;Matilda's,&quot; the English
+trading house, and one from the Dutch house and the French house,
+and each gig was manned by black boys in beautiful uniforms and
+fezzes, and each crew fought to tie up to the foot of the
+accommodation ladder. It was as gay as a regatta. On the
+quarter-deck the officers drank champagne, in the captain's cabin
+Hughes treated the traders to beer, in the &quot;square&quot; the non-coms. of
+the W.A.F.F.'s drank ale. The men who were going away on leave tried
+not to look too happy, and those who were going back to the shore
+drank deep and tried not to appear too carelessly gay. A billet on
+the West Coast is regarded by the man who accepts it as a sort of
+sporting proposition, as a game of three innings of nine months
+each, during which he matches his health against the Coast. If he
+lives he wins; if he dies the Coast wins.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a>[169]</span>After Calabar, at each port off which we anchored, at Ponny,
+Focardos, Lagos, Accra, Cape Coast Castle, and Sekonni, it was
+always the same. Always there came over the side the man going
+&quot;Home,&quot; the man who had fought with the Coast and won. He was as
+excited, as jubilant as a prisoner sentenced to death who had
+escaped his executioners. And always the heartiest in their
+congratulations were the men who were left behind, his brother
+officers, or his fellow traders, the men of the Sun Hat Brigade, in
+their unofficial uniforms, in shirtwaists, broad belts from which
+dangled keys and a whistle, beautifully polished tan boots, and with
+a wand-like whip or stick of elephant hide. They swarmed the decks
+and overwhelmed the escaping refugee with good wishes. He had
+cheated their common enemy. By merely keeping alive he had achieved
+a glorious victory. In their eyes he had performed a feat of
+endurance like swimming the English Channel. They crowded to
+congratulate him as people at the pit-mouth congratulate the
+entombed miner, who, after many days of breathing noisome gases,
+drinks the pure air. Even the black boys seem to feel <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a>[170]</span>the triumph
+of the white master, and their paddles never flashed so bravely, and
+their songs never rang so wildly, as when they were racing him away
+from the brooding Coast with its poisonous vapors toward the big
+white ship that meant health and home.</p>
+
+<p>Although most of the ports we saw only from across a mile or two of
+breakers, they always sent us something of interest. Sometimes all
+the male passengers came on board drunk. With the miners of the Gold
+Coast and the &quot;Palm Oil Ruffians&quot; it used to be a matter of
+etiquette not to leave the Coast in any other condition. Not so to
+celebrate your escape seemed ungenerous and ungrateful. At Sekondi
+one of the miners from Ashanti was so completely drunk, that he was
+swung over the side, tied up like a plum-pudding, in a bag.</p>
+
+<p>When he emerged from the bag his expression of polite inquiry was
+one with which all could sympathize. To lose consciousness on the
+veranda of a caf&eacute;, and awake with a bump on the deck of a steamer
+many miles at sea, must strengthen one's belief in magic carpets.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a>[171]</span>Another entertainment for the white passengers was when the boat
+boys fought for the black passengers as they were lowered in the
+mammy-chair. As a rule, in the boats from shore, there were twelve
+boys to paddle and three or four extra men to handle and unhook the
+mammy-chair and the luggage. While the boys with the paddles
+man&oelig;uvred to bring their boat next to the ship's side, the extra
+boys tried to pull their rivals overboard, dragging their hands from
+ropes and gunwales, and beating them with paddles. They did this
+while every second the boat under them was spinning in the air or
+diving ten feet into the hollow of the waves, and trying to smash
+itself and every other boat into driftwood. From the deck the second
+officer would swing a mammy-chair over the side with the idea of
+dropping it into one of these boats. But before the chair could be
+lowered, a rival boat would shove the first one away, and with a
+third boat would be fighting for its place. Meanwhile, high above
+the angry sea, the chair and its cargo of black women would be
+twirling like a weathercock and banging against the ship's side. The
+mammies were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a>[172]</span>too terrified to scream, but the ship's officers
+yelled and swore, the boat's crews shrieked, and the black babies
+howled. Each baby was strapped between the shoulders of the mother.
+A mammy-chair is like one of those two-seated swings in which people
+sit facing one another. If to the shoulders of each person in the
+swing was tied a baby, it is obvious that should the swing bump into
+anything, the baby would get the worst of it. That is what happened
+in the mammy-chair. Every time the chair spun around, the head of a
+baby would come &quot;crack!&quot; against the ship's side. So the babies
+howled, and no one of the ship's passengers, crowded six deep along
+the rail, blamed them. The skull of the Ethiopian may be hard, but
+it is most unfair to be swathed like a mummy so that you can neither
+kick nor strike back, and then have your head battered against a
+five-thousand-ton ship.</p>
+
+<p>How the boys who paddled the shore boats live long enough to learn
+how to handle them is a great puzzle. We were told that the method
+was to take out one green boy with a crew of eleven experts. But how
+did the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a>[173]</span>original eleven become experts? At Accra, where the waves
+are very high and rough, are the best boat boys on the coast. We
+watched the Custom House boat fight her way across the two miles of
+surf to the shore. The fight lasted two hours. It was as thrilling
+as watching a man cross Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. The greater
+part of the two hours the boat stood straight in the air, as though
+it meant to shake the crew into the sea, and the rest of the time it
+ran between walls of water ten feet high and was entirely lost to
+sight. Two things about the paddling on the West Coast make it
+peculiar; the boys sit, not on the thwarts, but on the gunwales, as
+a woman rides a side-saddle, and in many parts of the coast the boys
+use paddles shaped like a fork or a trident. One asks how, sitting
+as they do, they are able to brace themselves, and how with their
+forked paddles they obtained sufficient resistance. A coaster's
+explanation of the split paddle was that the boys did not want any
+more resistance than they could prevent.</p>
+
+<a name="img23" id="img23"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 397px;">
+<img src="images/img-23.jpg" width="397" height="450" alt="The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle." title= "The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle. </p>
+
+<p>There is no more royal manner of progress than when one of these
+boats lifts you over <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a>[174]</span>the waves, with the boys chanting some wild
+chorus, with their bare bodies glistening, their teeth and eyes
+shining, the splendid muscles straining, and the dripping paddles
+flashing like twelve mirrors.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power,
+and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in
+unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a
+sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to the
+newly rich.</p>
+
+<p>I knew I had left the West Coast when, the very night we sailed from
+Sierra Leone, for greater comfort, I reached for a linen bed-spread
+that during four stifling, reeking weeks had lain undisturbed at the
+foot of the berth. During that time I had hated it as a monstrous
+thing; as something as hot and heavy as a red flannel blanket, as a
+buffalo robe. And when, on the following night, I found the
+wind-screen was not in the air port, and that, nevertheless, I still
+was alive, I knew we had passed out of reach of the Equator, and
+that all that followed would be as conventional as the &quot;trippers&quot;
+who <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a>[175]</span>joined us at the Canary Isles; and as familiar as the low, gray
+skies, the green, rain-soaked hills, and the complaining Channel
+gulls that convoyed us into Plymouth Harbor.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr  class="short" />
+<br />
+
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a>[176]</span>
+
+<h3>ALONG THE EAST COAST</h3>
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Were a man picked up on a flying carpet and dropped without warning
+into Loren&ccedil;o Marquez, he might guess for a day before he could make
+up his mind where he was, or determine to which nation the place
+belonged.</p>
+
+<p>If he argued from the adobe houses with red-tiled roofs and walls of
+cobalt blue, the palms, and the yellow custom-house, he might think
+he was in Santiago; the Indian merchants in velvet and gold
+embroideries seated in deep, dark shops which breathe out dry,
+pungent odors, might take him back to Bombay; the Soudanese and
+Egyptians in long blue night-gowns and freshly ironed fezzes would
+remind him of Cairo; the dwarfish Portuguese soldiers, of Madeira,
+Lisbon, and Madrid, and the black, bare-legged policemen in khaki
+with great numerals on their chests, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a>[177]</span>of Benin, Sierra Leone, or
+Zanzibar. After he had noted these and the German, French, and
+English merchants in white duck, and the Dutch man-of-warsmen, who
+look like ship's stewards, the French marines in coal-scuttle
+helmets, the British Jack-tars in their bare feet, and the native
+Kaffir women, each wrapped in a single, gorgeous shawl with a black
+baby peering from beneath her shoulder-blades, he would decide, by
+using the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, that he was in the
+Midway of the Chicago Fair.</p>
+
+<p>Several hundred years ago Da Gama sailed into Delagoa Bay and
+founded the town of Loren&ccedil;o Marquez, and since that time the
+Portuguese have always felt that it is only due to him and to
+themselves to remain there. They have great pride of race, and they
+like the fact that they possess and govern a colony. So, up to the
+present time, in spite of many temptations to dispose of it, they
+have made the ownership of Delagoa Bay an article of their national
+religion. But their national religion does not require of them to
+improve their property. And to-day it is much as it <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a>[178]</span>was when the
+sails of Da Gama's fleet first stirred its poisonous vapors.</p>
+
+<p>The harbor itself is an excellent one and the bay is twenty-two
+miles along, but there is only one landing-pier, and that such a
+pier as would be considered inconsistent with the dignity of the
+Larchmont Yacht Club. To the town itself Portugal has been content
+to contribute as her share the gatherers of taxes, collectors of
+customs and dispensers of official seals. She is indifferent to the
+fact that the bulk of general merchandise, wine, and machinery that
+enter her port is brought there by foreigners. She only demands that
+they buy her stamps. Her importance in her own colony is that of a
+toll-gate at the entrance of a great city.</p>
+
+<p>Loren&ccedil;o Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home.
+When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen
+a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried
+hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months,
+the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were
+robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a>[179]</span>one of the
+twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and
+unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of
+Loren&ccedil;o Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and
+selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous
+of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its
+patrons that &quot;Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests
+will please lock their doors.&quot; This was one of three hotels owned by
+the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the
+&quot;tough&quot; hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had
+found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat
+difficult.</p>
+
+<p>On her way from Loren&ccedil;o Marquez to Beira our ship, the <i>Kanzlar</i>,
+kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow
+sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of
+outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue
+mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great
+inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern
+coast and against which the waves <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a>[180]</span>break with a report like the
+bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and
+the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills
+accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw
+Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four
+stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the
+summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the
+sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the
+lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were
+more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It
+suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the
+board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her
+Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing
+except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this
+should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the
+Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and
+instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt
+were only opened for the summer season and which for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a>[181]</span>the rest of
+the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial
+gales. Beira need only to have added to her &quot;Sea-View&quot; and &quot;Beach&quot;
+hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type
+artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home.
+Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and
+Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and
+Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many
+ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were
+moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Loren&ccedil;o
+Marquez, was brisk, busy, and clean. Although both are ostensibly
+Portuguese, Beira is to Loren&ccedil;o Marquez what the cleanest street of
+Greenwich Village, of New York City, is to &quot;Hell's Kitchen&quot; and the
+Chinese Quarter. The houses were well swept and cool, the shops were
+alluring, the streets were of clean shifting white sand, and the
+sidewalks, of gray cement, were as well kept as a Philadelphia
+doorstep. The most curious feature of Beira is her private tram-car
+system. These cars run on tiny tracks which rise out of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a>[182]</span>sand
+and extend from one end of the town to the other, with branch lines
+running into the yards of shops and private houses. The motive power
+for these cars is supplied by black boys who run behind and push
+them. Their trucks are about half as large as those on the hand-cars
+we see flying along our railroad tracks at home, worked by gangs of
+Italian laborers. On some of the trucks there is only a bench,
+others are shaded by awnings, and a few have carriage-lamps and
+cushioned seats and carpets. Each of them is a private conveyance;
+there is not one which can be hired by the public. When a merchant
+wishes to go down town to the port, his black boys carry his private
+tram-car from his garden and settle it on the rails, the merchant
+seats himself, and the boys push him and his baby-carriage to
+whatever part of the city he wishes to go. When his wife is out
+shopping and stops at a store the boys lift her car into the sand in
+order to make a clear track for any other car which may be coming
+behind them. One would naturally suppose that with the tracks and
+switch-boards and sidings already laid, the next step <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a>[183]</span>would be to
+place cars upon them for the convenience of the public, but this is
+not the case, and the tracks through the city are jealously reserved
+for the individuals who tax themselves five pounds a year to extend
+them and to keep them in repair. After the sleds on the island of
+Madeira these private street-cars of Beira struck me as being the
+most curious form of conveyance I had ever seen.</p>
+
+<a name="img24" id="img24"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 298px;">
+<img src="images/img-24.jpg" width="298" height="450" alt="Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira."
+title="Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira. </p>
+
+<p>Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of
+feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some
+of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of
+Cape Town and Durban. But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on
+the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company's possessions,
+and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was
+necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build
+a railroad through the swamp and jungle. This road is now in
+operation. It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the
+brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress
+through the marshes, two hundred of the men working <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a>[184]</span>on it died of
+fever. Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the
+Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the
+Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police. How this
+was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied,
+Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of &quot;Judson and the
+Empire.&quot; It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored
+it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat. A
+week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all
+the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had
+made no mention of the fact. The result was that the <i>Kanzlar</i> was
+hung up for twenty-four hours. We tried to comfort ourselves by
+thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which
+had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of
+empire.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Kanzlar</i> could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the
+<i>Adjutant</i>, which belongs to the same line and which was created for
+these shallow waters, came to the <i>Kanzlar</i>, bringing Chinde with
+her. She brought every white <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a>[185]</span>man in the port, and those who could
+not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the <i>Adjutant</i>,
+clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed
+high above us. For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as
+though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that
+brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the
+pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the <i>Adjutant</i>, in white
+duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of
+Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower
+deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as
+Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and
+gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new
+leather cases. From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and
+from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in
+fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian
+coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound
+and unwound long blue strips of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a>[186]</span>cotton about their shoulders, or
+ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading
+required. Among these strange peoples were goats, as delicately
+colored as a meerschaum pipe, and with the horns of our red deer,
+strange white oxen with humps behind the shoulders, those that are
+exhibited in cages at home as &quot;sacred buffalo,&quot; but which here are
+only patient beasts of burden, and gray monkeys, wildcats, snakes
+and crocodiles in cages addressed to &quot;Hagenbeck, Hamburg.&quot; The
+freight was no less curious; assegais in bundles, horns stretching
+for three feet from point to point, or rising straight, like
+poignards; skins, ground-nuts, rubber, and heavy blocks of bees-wax
+wrapped in coarse brown sacking, and which in time will burn before
+the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Italy, Spain, and France.</p>
+
+<p>People of the &quot;Bromide&quot; class who run across a friend from their own
+city in Paris will say, &quot;Well, to think of meeting <i>you</i> here. How
+small the world is after all!&quot; If they wish a better proof of how
+really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the
+existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a>[187]</span>twenty stores in
+Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not
+the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man
+who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the
+latitudes together and made the world the small department store it
+is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.</p>
+
+<p>The explorer tells you, &quot;I was the first man to climb Kilamajaro.&quot;
+&quot;I was the first to cut a path from the shores of Lake Nyassa into
+the Congo Basin.&quot; He even lectures about it, in front of a wet sheet
+in the light of a stereopticon, and because he has added some miles
+of territory to the known world, people buy his books and learned
+societies place initials after his distinguished name. But before
+his grandfather was born and long before he ever disturbed the
+waters of Nyassa the Ph&oelig;nicians and Arabs and Portuguese and men
+of his own time and race had been there before him to buy ivory,
+both white and black, to exchange beads and brass bars and
+shaving-mirrors for the tusks of elephants, raw gold, copra, rubber,
+and the feathers of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a>[188]</span>the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a
+study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its
+way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in
+consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts
+which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But
+that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear
+at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders,
+backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast
+of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships
+faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire
+Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre
+Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being
+planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want
+tires for their automobiles; and because the fashionable ornament of
+the natives of Swaziland is, for no reason, no longer blue-glass
+beads, manufacturers of beads in Switzerland and Italy find
+themselves out of pocket by some thousands and thousands of pounds.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a>[189]</span>The traders who were making the world smaller by bringing cotton
+prints to Chinde to cover her black nakedness, her British Majesty's
+consul at that port, and the boy lieutenant of the paddle-wheeled
+gunboat which patrols the Zambesi River, were the gentlemen who
+informed me that they were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom
+the <i>Kanzlar</i> might have picked up from a desert island, where they
+had been marooned and left to rot. They observed the gilded glory of
+the <i>Kanzlar</i> smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables,
+with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all
+the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus.
+The boy-commander of the gunboat gazed at white women in the saloon
+with fascinated admiration.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have never,&quot; he declared, breathlessly, &quot;I have never seen so
+many beautiful women in one place at the same time! I'd forgotten
+that there were so many white people in the world.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If I stay on board this ship another min<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a>[190]</span>ute I shall go home,&quot; said
+Her Majesty's consul, firmly. &quot;You will have to hold me. It's coming
+over me&mdash;I feel it coming. I shall never have the strength to go
+back.&quot; He appealed to the sympathetic lieutenant. &quot;Let's desert
+together,&quot; he begged.</p>
+
+<a name="img25" id="img25"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 385px;">
+<img src="images/img-25.jpg" width="385" height="450" alt="One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+Mozambique." title="One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+Mozambique." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+Mozambique. </p>
+
+<p>In the swamps of the East Coast the white exiles lay aside the
+cloaks and masks of crowded cities. They do not try to conceal their
+feelings, their vices, or their longings. They talk to the first
+white stranger they meet of things which in the great cities a man
+conceals even from his room-mate, and men they would not care to
+know, and whom they would never meet in the fixed social pathways of
+civilization, they take to their hearts as friends. They are too few
+to be particular, they have no choice, and they ask no questions. It
+is enough that the white man, like themselves, is condemned to
+exile. They do not try to find solace in the thought that they are
+the &quot;foretrekkers&quot; of civilization, or take credit to themselves
+because they are the path-finders and the pioneers who bear the heat
+and burden of the day. They are sorry for themselves, because they
+know, more keenly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a>[191]</span>than any outsider can know, how good is the life
+they have given up, and how hard is the one they follow, but they do
+not ask anyone else to be sorry. They would be very much surprised
+if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and
+Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good
+and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>On the day they boarded the <i>Kanzlar</i> the pains of nostalgia were
+sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves
+of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own
+condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck,
+as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even
+boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess,
+who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.</p>
+
+<p>A little English boy ran through the smoking-room, and they fell
+upon him, and quarrelled for the privilege of holding him on their
+knees. He was a shy, coquettish little English boy, and the
+boisterous, noisy men did not appeal to him. To them he meant home
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a>[192]</span>and family and the old nursery, papered with colored pictures from
+the Christmas <i>Graphic</i>. His stout, bare legs and tangled curls and
+sailor's hat, with &quot;H.M.S. Mars&quot; across it, meant all that was clean
+and sweet-smelling in their past lives.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'll arrest you for a deserter,&quot; said the lieutenant of the
+gunboat. &quot;I'll make the consul send you back to the <i>Mars</i>.&quot; He held
+the boy on his knee fearfully, handling him as though he were some
+delicate and precious treasure that might break if he dropped it.</p>
+
+<p>The agent of the Oceanic Development Company, Limited, whose
+business in life is to drive savage Angonis out of the jungle, where
+he hopes in time to see the busy haunts of trade, begged for the boy
+with eloquent pleading.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You've had the kiddie long enough now,&quot; he urged. &quot;Let me have him.
+Come here, Mr. Mars, and sit beside me, and I'll give you fizzy
+water&mdash;like lemon-squash, only nicer.&quot; He held out a wet bottle of
+champagne alluringly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, he is coming to his consul,&quot; that youth declared. &quot;He's coming
+to his consul <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a>[193]</span>for protection. You are not fit characters to
+associate with an innocent child. Come to me, little boy, and do not
+listen to those degraded persons.&quot; So the &quot;innocent child&quot; seated
+himself between the consul and the chartered trader, and they patted
+his fat calves and red curls and took his minute hands in their
+tanned fists, eying him hungrily, like two cannibals. But the little
+boy was quite unconscious and inconsiderate of their hunger, and,
+with the cruelty of children, pulled himself free and ran away.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was such a nice little kiddie,&quot; they said, apologetically, as
+though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years,&quot;
+said the lieutenant, genially. &quot;But fancy your knowing Sparks! He
+has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and
+he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the
+lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's
+where we hit it off&mdash;we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I
+suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down
+here. I know <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a>[194]</span>Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to
+talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks
+has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred
+miles.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely
+that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and
+spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the
+second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized
+a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were
+sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving
+themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a &quot;disgusting
+practice,&quot; and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the
+lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; he said; &quot;and what's worse is that we're here for two years
+more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China.
+Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old,
+and the steamer stops once every month.&quot;</p>
+
+<a name="img26" id="img26"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-26.jpg" width="500" height="366" alt="Custom House, Zanzibar."
+title="Custom House, Zanzibar." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Custom House, Zanzibar. </p>
+
+<p>Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side,
+so we had time in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a>[195]</span>which to give the exiles the news of the outside
+world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one
+as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy;
+how another had sold &quot;ready to wear&quot; clothes in a New York
+department store, and another had been attach&eacute; at Madrid, and
+another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We
+exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would
+meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many
+bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect
+the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.</p>
+
+<p>But at last the ship's whistle blew with raucous persistence. It was
+final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which
+once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages,
+of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and
+flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the
+mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the
+<i>Kanzlar</i> became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon
+line.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a>[196]</span>I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them
+until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to
+borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with
+never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean
+land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty
+group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was
+more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall
+never meet them again&mdash;we had just burned signals as our ships
+passed in the night&mdash;and yet, I must always consider among the
+friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways
+straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi,
+&quot;the only respectable members of Chinde Society.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1"> *</a></p>
+
+<p class="foot"><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1">*</a>
+N<small>OTE</small>&mdash;I did not lose the white-clad youths. The
+lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a
+consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde
+newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also,
+should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.
+He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the
+<i>Kanzlar</i>, alone prevented his social position being publicly
+recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though
+tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society.&nbsp;&nbsp; R.H.D.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a>[197]</span>The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his
+contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one
+which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its
+inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown
+jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the
+captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down
+with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the
+slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the
+casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the
+sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the
+shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the
+harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by
+the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of
+the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom
+this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of
+honor.</p>
+
+<a name="img27" id="img27"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-27.jpg" width="500" height="363" alt="Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar."
+title="Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar. </p>
+
+<p>Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great
+slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a>[198]</span>fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a
+fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison
+and all the inhabitants as well. To-day the slave-trade brings to
+those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but
+the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain,
+and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and
+red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been
+so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has
+taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The
+streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their
+silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day,
+which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no
+footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs.
+The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares
+to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no
+carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and
+refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the
+city, and with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a>[199]</span>the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only
+wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.</p>
+
+<p>I have never visited a city which so impressed one with the fact
+that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred
+years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is,
+on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with
+dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving
+above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city
+of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as
+letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and
+the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy
+curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers
+of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along
+the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great
+blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated
+checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are
+palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and
+churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard
+the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a>[200]</span>or leave the
+churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty
+stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the
+actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the
+fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous
+period, when the Portuguese governors, the &quot;gentlemen adventurers,&quot;
+and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within
+its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery,
+when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and
+the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the
+market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of
+bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves
+bought and sold.</p>
+
+<p>In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of
+East Africa from south of Loren&ccedil;o Marquez to north of Mozambique,
+and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog
+in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to
+help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he
+keeps those who would improve both from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a>[201]</span>gaining any hold or
+influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East
+Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now
+surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack
+of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the
+country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side.
+They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely
+lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats
+they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new
+territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars
+them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth
+undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his caf&eacute; at the coast
+and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the
+native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and
+the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to
+cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them
+no protection.</p>
+
+<p>The land back of Mozambique is divided into &quot;holdings,&quot; and the rent
+of each holding is based upon the number of native huts it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a>[202]</span>contains. The tax per hut is one pound a year, and these holdings
+are leased to any Portuguese who promises to pay the combined taxes
+of all the huts. He also engages to cut new roads, to keep those
+already made in repair, and to furnish a sufficient number of police
+to maintain order. The lessees of these holdings have given rise to
+many and terrible scandals. In the majority of cases, the lessee,
+once out of reach of all authority and of public opinion, and
+wielding the power of life and death, becomes a tyrant and
+task-master over his district, taxing the natives to five and ten
+times the amount which each is supposed to furnish, and treating
+them virtually as his bondsmen. Up along the Shire River, the
+lessees punish the blacks by hanging them from a tree by their
+ankles and beating their bare backs with rhinoceros hide, until, as
+it has been described to me by a reputable English resident, the
+blood runs in a stream over the negro's shoulders, and forms a pool
+beneath his eyes.</p>
+
+<a name="img28" id="img28"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-28.jpg" width="500" height="329" alt="The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking, Is
+Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A."
+title="The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking, Is
+Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking, Is
+Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A. </p>
+
+<p>You hear of no legitimate enterprise fostered by these lessees, of
+no development of natural resources, but, instead, you are told
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a>[203]</span>tales of sickening cruelty, and you can read in the consular
+reports others quite as true; records of heartless treatment of
+natives, of neglect of great resources, and of hurried snatching at
+the year's crop and a return to the Coast, with nothing to show of
+sustained effort or steady development. The incompetence of Portugal
+cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the
+Boer, she will find the seaport of Loren&ccedil;o Marquez too necessary to
+her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the
+Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the
+Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African
+Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to
+make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It
+seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little
+kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to
+benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she will
+withdraw from it, in favor of those who are fitter to survive her.</p>
+
+<p>There is no more interesting contrast along <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a>[204]</span>the coast of East
+Africa than that presented by the colonies of England, Germany, and
+Portugal. Of these three, the colonies of the Englishmen are, as one
+expects to find them, the healthiest, the busiest, and the most
+prosperous. They thrive under your very eyes; you feel that they
+were established where they are, not by accident, not to gratify a
+national vanity or a ruler's ambition, but with foresight and with
+knowledge, and with the determination to make money; and that they
+will increase and flourish because they are situated where the
+natives and settlers have something to sell, and where the men can
+bring, in return, something the natives and colonials wish to buy.
+Port Elizabeth, Durban, East London, and Zanzibar belong to this
+prosperous class, which gives good reason for the faith of those who
+founded them.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, as opposed to these, there are the settlements of
+the Portuguese, rotten and corrupt, and the German settlements of
+Dar Es Salaam and Tanga which have still to prove their right to
+exist. Outwardly, to the eye, they are model settlements. Dar Es
+Salaam, in particular, is a beautiful <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a>[205]</span>and perfectly appointed
+colonial town. In the care in which it is laid out, in the
+excellence of its sanitary arrangements, in its cleanliness, and in
+the magnificence of its innumerable official residences, and in
+their sensible adaptability to the needs of the climate, one might
+be deceived into believing that Dar Es Salaam is the beautiful
+gateway of a thriving and busy colony. But there are no ramparts of
+merchandise along her wharves, no bulwarks of strangely scented
+bales blocking her water-front; no lighters push hurriedly from the
+shore to meet the ship, although she is a German ship, or to receive
+her cargo of articles &quot;made in Germany.&quot; On the contrary, her
+freight is unloaded at the English ports, and taken on at English
+ports. And the German traders who send their merchandise to Hamburg
+in her hold come over the side at Zanzibar, at Durban, and at Aden,
+where the English merchants find in them fierce competitors. There
+is nothing which goes so far to prove the falsity of the saying that
+&quot;trade follows the flag&quot; as do these model German colonies with
+their barracks, governor's palace, officers' clubs, public <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a>[206]</span>pleasure
+parks, and with no trade; and the English colonies, where the German
+merchants remain, and where, under the English flag, they grow
+steadily rich. The German Emperor, believing that colonies are a
+source of strength to an empire, rather than the weakness that they
+are, has raised the German flag in Central East Africa, but the
+ships of the German East African Company, subsidized by him, carry
+their merchandize to the English ports, and his German subjects
+remain where they can make the most money. They do not move to those
+ports where the flag of their country would wave over them.</p>
+
+<p>Dar Es Salaam, although it lacks the one thing needful to make it a
+model settlement, possesses all the other things which are needful,
+and many which are pure luxuries. Its residences, as I have said,
+have been built after the most approved scientific principles of
+ventilation and sanitation. In no tropical country have I seen
+buildings so admirably adapted to the heat and climatic changes and
+at the same time more in keeping with the surrounding scenery. They
+are handsome, cool-looking, white and clean, with broad <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a>[207]</span>verandas,
+high walls, and false roofs under which currents of air are lured in
+spite of themselves. The residences are set back along the high bank
+which faces the bay. In front of them is a public promenade, newly
+planted shade-trees arch over it, and royal palms reach up to it
+from the very waters of the harbor. At one end of this semicircle
+are the barracks of the Soudanese soldiers, and at the other is the
+official palace of the governor. Everything in the settlement is
+new, and everything is built on the scale of a city, and with the
+idea of accommodating a great number of people. Hotels and caf&eacute;s,
+better than any one finds in the older settlements along the coast,
+are arranged on the water-front, and there is a church capable of
+seating the entire white population at one time. If the place is to
+grow, it can do so only through trade, and when trade really comes
+all these palaces and caf&eacute;s and barracks which occupy the entire
+water-front will have to be pushed back to make way for warehouses
+and custom-house sheds. At present it is populated only by
+officials, and, I believe, twelve white women.</p>
+
+<a name="img29" id="img29"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-29.jpg" width="500" height="349" alt="The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage."
+title="The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage. </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a>[208]</span>You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a
+box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this
+beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and
+emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at
+a world's fair as an example of a model village.</p>
+
+<p>In writing of Zanzibar I am embarrassed by the knowledge that I am
+not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first
+sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage
+out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me
+made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.</p>
+
+<p>Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of
+high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand
+at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the
+people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run
+ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass
+of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty
+fortress-like fa&ccedil;ade before you, and a strip of white sand is at
+your feet.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a>[209]</span>And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind
+resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack
+in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls
+where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak,
+and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.</p>
+
+<p>In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous,
+unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework,
+windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of
+the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue,
+and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and
+the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East
+African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering
+walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either
+actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and
+glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him;
+the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their
+children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a>[210]</span>bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you
+with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare
+shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows
+dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long
+and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of
+richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces
+of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts,
+and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of
+the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it
+is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.</p>
+
+<p>The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think
+Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in
+your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a
+vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of
+Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it
+healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection
+for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm
+government under a benign <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a>[211]</span>and gentle Sultan, they have done all of
+this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb
+of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous
+life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but
+they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at
+all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does
+in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in
+Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers
+alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so
+infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for
+those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly
+for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.</p>
+
+<a name="img30" id="img30"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 330px;">
+<img src="images/img-30.jpg" width="330" height="450" alt="H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan of
+Zanzibar." title="H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan of
+Zanzibar." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan of
+Zanzibar. </p>
+
+<p>Zanzibar is an &quot;Arabian Nights&quot; city, a comic-opera capital, a most
+difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any
+house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and
+decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel
+sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe
+walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a>[212]</span>carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing
+will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that
+the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the
+next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will
+prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.</p>
+
+<p>Several hundred years ago the Sultans of Zanzibar grew powerful and
+wealthy through exporting slaves and ivory from the mainland. These
+were not two separate industries, but one was developed by the other
+and was dependent upon it. The procedure was brutally simple. A
+slave-trader, having first paid his tribute to the Sultan, crossed
+to the mainland, and marching into the interior made his bargain
+with one of the local chiefs for so much ivory, and for so many men
+to carry it down to the coast. Without some such means of transport
+there could have been no bargain, so the chief who was anxious to
+sell would select a village which had not paid him the taxes due
+him, and bid the trader help himself to what men he found there.
+Then would follow a hideous night attack, a massacre of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a>[213]</span>women and
+children, and the taking prisoners of all able-bodied males. These
+men, chained together in long lines, and each bearing a heavy tooth
+of ivory upon his shoulder, would be whipped down to the coast. It
+was only when they had carried the ivory there, and their work was
+finished, that the idea presented itself of selling them as well as
+the ivory. Later, these bearers became of equal value with the
+ivory, and the raiding of native villages and the capture of men and
+women to be sold into slavery developed into a great industry. The
+industry continues fitfully to-day, but it is carried on under great
+difficulties, and at a risk of heavy punishments. What is called
+&quot;domestic slavery&quot; is recognized on the island of Zanzibar, the vast
+clove plantations which lie back of the port employing many hundreds
+of these domestic slaves. It is not to free these from their slight
+bondage that the efforts of those who are trying to suppress the
+slave-trade is to-day directed, but to prevent others from being
+added to their number. What slave-trading there is at present is by
+Arabs and Indians. They convey the slaves in dhows from the mainland
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a>[214]</span>to Madagascar, Arabia, or southern Persia, and to the Island of
+Pemba, which lies north of Zanzibar, and only fifteen miles from the
+mainland. If a slave can be brought this short distance in safety he
+can be sold for five hundred dollars; on the mainland he is not
+worth more than fifteen dollars. The channels, and the mouths of
+rivers, and the little bays opening from the Island of Pemba are
+patrolled more or less regularly by British gunboats, and junior
+officers in charge of a cutter and a crew of half a dozen men, are
+detached from these for a few months at a time on &quot;boat service.&quot; It
+seems to be an unprofitable pursuit, for one officer told me that
+during his month of boat service he had boarded and searched three
+hundred dhows, which is an average of ten a day, and found slaves on
+only one of them. But as, on this occasion, he rescued four slaves,
+and the slavers, moreover, showed fight, and wounded him and two of
+his boat's crew, he was more than satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>The trade in ivory, which has none of these restrictions upon it,
+still flourishes, and the cool, dark warerooms of Zanzibar are
+stored <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a>[215]</span>high with it. In a corner of one little cellar they showed
+us twenty-five thousand dollars worth of these tusks piled up as
+carelessly as though they were logs in a wood-shed. One of the most
+curious sights in Zanzibar is a line of Zanzibari boys, each
+balancing a great tusk on his shoulder, worth from five hundred to
+two thousand dollars, and which is unprotected except for a piece of
+coarse sacking.</p>
+
+<a name="img31" id="img31"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-31.jpg" width="500" height="327" alt="A German &quot;Factory&quot; at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+Living Apartments Above." title="A German &quot;Factory&quot; at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+Living Apartments Above." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">A German &quot;Factory&quot; at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+Living Apartments Above. </p>
+
+<p>The largest exporters of ivory in the world are at Zanzibar, and
+though probably few people know it, the firm which carries on this
+business belongs to New York City, and has been in the ivory trade
+with India and Africa from as far back as the fifties. In their
+house at Zanzibar they have entertained every distinguished African
+explorer, and the stories its walls have heard of native wars,
+pirate dhows, slave-dealers, the English occupation, and terrible
+marches through the jungles of the Congo, would make valuable and
+picturesque history. The firm has always held a semi-official
+position, for the reason that the United States Consul at Zanzibar,
+who should speak at least Swahili and Portuguese, is invariably
+chosen for the post from a drug-store <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a>[216]</span>in Yankton, Dakota, or a
+post-office in Canton, Ohio. Consequently, on arriving at Zanzibar
+he becomes homesick, and his first official act is to cable his
+resignation, and the State Department instructs whoever happens to
+be general manager of the ivory house to perform the duties of
+acting-consul. So, the ivory house has nearly always held the eagle
+of the consulate over its doorway. The manager of the ivory house,
+who at the time of our visit was also consul, is Harris Robbins
+Childs. Mr. Childs is well known in New York City, is a member of
+many clubs there, and speaks at least five languages. He understands
+the native tongue of Zanzibar so well that when the Prime Minister
+of the Sultan took us to the palace to pay our respects, Childs
+talked the language so much better than did the Sultan's own Prime
+Minister that there was in consequence much joking and laughing. The
+Sultan then was a most dignified, intelligent, and charming old
+gentleman. He was popular both with his own people, who loved him
+with a religious fervor, and with the English, who unobtrusively
+conducted his affairs.</p>
+
+<p>There have been sultans who have acted <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a>[217]</span>less wisely than does Hamud
+bin Muhamad bin Said. A few years ago one of these, Said Khaled,
+defied the British Empire as represented by several gunboats, and
+dared them to fire on his ship of war, a tramp steamer which he had
+converted into a royal yacht. The gunboats were anchored about two
+hundred yards from the palace, which stands at the water's edge, and
+at the time agreed upon, they sank the Sultan's ship of war in the
+short space of three minutes, and in a brief bombardment destroyed
+the greater part of his palace. The ship of war still rests where
+she sank, and her topmasts peer above the water only three hundred
+yards distant from the windows of the new palace. They serve as a
+constant warning to all future sultans.</p>
+
+<p>The new palace is of somewhat too modern architecture, and is not
+nearly as dignified as are the massive white walls of the native
+houses which surround it. But within it is a fairy palace, hung with
+silk draperies, tapestries, and hand-painted curtains; the floors
+are covered with magnificent rugs from Persia and India, and the
+reception-room is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a>[218]</span>crowded with treasures of ebony, ivory, lacquer
+work, and gold and silver. There were two thrones made of silver
+dragons, with many scales, and studded with jewels. The Sultan did
+not seem to mind our openly admiring his treasures, and his
+attendants, who stood about him in gorgeous-colored silks heavy with
+gold embroideries, were evidently pleased with the deep impression
+they made upon the visitors. The Sultan was very gentle and
+courteous and human, especially in the pleasure he took over his son
+and heir, who then was at school in England, and who, on the death
+of his father, succeeded him. He seemed very much gratified when we
+suggested that there was no better training-place for a boy than an
+English public school; as Americans, he thought our opinion must be
+unprejudiced. Before he sent us away, he gave Childs, and each of
+us, a photograph of himself, one of which is reproduced in this
+book.</p>
+
+<p>Our next port was the German settlement of Tanga. We arrived there
+just as a blood-red sun was setting behind great and gloomy
+mountains. The place itself was bathed in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a>[219]</span>damp hot vapors, and
+surrounded even to the water's edge by a steaming jungle. It was
+more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we
+had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a
+trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the
+evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp
+three lions had kept him awake until morning.</p>
+
+<a name="img32" id="img32"></a>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/img-32.jpg" width="500" height="323" alt="Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+Tanga." title="Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+Tanga." />
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+Tanga. </p>
+
+<p>The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports. We saw them
+only through field-glasses from the ship's side, so that there is,
+in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of
+Africa. But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the
+Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has passed
+away. It was certainly worth taking once. If I have failed to make
+that apparent, the fault lies with the writer. It is certainly not
+the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that
+&quot;sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue,&quot; or of the
+exiles and &quot;remittance men,&quot; or of the engineers who are building
+the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest
+which the East Coast <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a>[220]</span>presents in its problem of trade, of conquest,
+and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Congo and Coasts of Africa
+by Richard Harding Davis
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's The Congo and Coasts of Africa, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Congo and Coasts of Africa
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: December 8, 2004 [EBook #14297]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+Sierra Leone, as originally purchased in 1786, consisted of twenty
+square miles, for which among other articles of equal value King
+Naimbanna received a "crimson satin embroidered waistcoat, one
+puncheon of rum, ten pounds of beads, two cheeses, one box of
+smoking pipes, a mock diamond ring, and a tierce of pork."
+
+What first impressed me about Sierra Leone was the heat. It does not
+permit one to give his attention wholly to anything else. I always
+have maintained that the hottest place on earth is New York, and I
+have been in other places with more than a local reputation for
+heat; some along the Equator, Lourenco Marquez, which is only
+prevented from being an earthen oven because it is a swamp; the Red
+Sea, with a following breeze, and from both shores the baked heat of
+the desert, and Nagasaki, on a rainy day in midsummer.
+
+But New York in August radiating stored-up heat from iron-framed
+buildings, with the foul, dead air shut in by the skyscrapers, with
+a humidity that makes you think you are breathing through a
+steam-heated sponge, is as near the lower regions as I hope any of
+us will go. And yet Sierra Leone is no mean competitor.
+
+We climbed the moss-covered steps to the quay to face a great white
+building that blazed like the base of a whitewashed stove at white
+heat. Before it were some rusty cannon and a canoe cut out of a
+single tree, and, seated upon it selling fruit and sun-dried fish,
+some native women, naked to the waist, their bodies streaming with
+palm oil and sweat. At the same moment something struck me a blow on
+the top of the head, at the base of the spine and between the
+shoulder blades, and the ebony ladies and the white "factory" were
+burnt up in a scroll of flame.
+
+ [Illustration: A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
+ Whitewashed Stove at White Heat.]
+
+I heard myself in a far-away voice asking where one could buy a sun
+helmet and a white umbrella, and until I was under their protection,
+Sierra Leone interested me no more.
+
+One sees more different kinds of black people in Sierra Leone than
+in any other port along the Coast; Senegalese and Senegambians,
+Kroo boys, Liberians, naked bush boys bearing great burdens from the
+forests, domestic slaves in fez and colored linen livery, carrying
+hammocks swung from under a canopy, the local electric hansom,
+soldiers of the W.A.F.F., the West African Frontier Force, in Zouave
+uniform of scarlet and khaki, with bare legs; Arabs from as far in
+the interior as Timbuctu, yellow in face and in long silken robes;
+big fat "mammies" in well-washed linen like the washerwomen of
+Jamaica, each balancing on her head her tightly rolled umbrella, and
+in the gardens slim young girls, with only a strip of blue and white
+linen from the waist to the knees, lithe, erect, with glistening
+teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission
+schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms.
+Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the
+tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public
+schools operated by the government as well as many others run by
+American and English missions, a club where the white "mammies," as
+all women are called, and the white officers--for Sierra Leone is a
+coaling station on the Cape route to India, and is garrisoned
+accordingly--play croquet, and bowl into a net.
+
+When the officers are not bowling they are tramping into the
+hinterland after tribes on the warpath from Liberia, and coming
+back, perhaps wounded or racked with fever, or perhaps they do not
+come back. On the day we landed they had just buried one of the
+officers. On Saturday afternoon he had been playing tennis, during
+the night the fever claimed him, and Sunday night he was dead.
+
+That night as we pulled out to the steamer there came toward us in
+black silhouette against the sun, setting blood-red into the lagoon,
+two great canoes. They were coming from up the river piled high with
+fruit and bark, with the women and children lying huddled in the
+high bow and stern, while amidships the twelve men at the oars
+strained and struggled until we saw every muscle rise under the
+black skin.
+
+As their stroke slackened, the man in the bow with the tom-tom beat
+more savagely upon it, and shouted to them in shrill sharp cries.
+Their eyes shone, their teeth clenched, the sweat streamed from
+their naked bodies. They might have been slaves chained to the
+thwarts of a trireme.
+
+Just ahead of them lay at anchor the only other ship beside our own
+in port, a two-masted schooner, the _Gladys E. Wilden_, out of
+Boston. Her captain leaned upon the rail smoking his cigar, his
+shirt-sleeves held up with pink elastics, on the back of his head a
+derby hat. As the rowers passed under his bows he looked critically
+at the streaming black bodies and spat meditatively into the water.
+His own father could have had them between decks as cargo. Now for
+the petroleum and lumber he brings from Massachusetts to Sierra
+Leone he returns in ballast.
+
+Because her lines were so home-like and her captain came from Cape
+Cod, we wanted to call on the _Gladys E. Wilden_, but our own
+captain had different views, and the two ships passed in the night,
+and the man from Boston never will know that two folks from home
+were burning signals to him.
+
+Because our next port of call, Grand Bassam, is the chief port of
+the French Ivory Coast, which is 125,000 square miles in extent, we
+expected quite a flourishing seaport. Instead, Grand Bassam was a
+bank of yellow sand, a dozen bungalows in a line, a few wind-blown
+cocoanut palms, an iron pier, and a French flag. Beyond the cocoanut
+palms we could see a great lagoon, and each minute a wave leaped
+roaring upon the yellow sand-bank and tried to hurl itself across
+it, eating up the bungalows on its way, into the quiet waters of the
+lake. Each time we were sure it would succeed, but the yellow bank
+stood like rock, and, beaten back, the wave would rise in white
+spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the
+sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet
+of the bungalows.
+
+We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who
+had come out to join her husband. His factory is a two days' launch
+ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not
+speak English. Her husband had wished her, for her health's sake, to
+stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and
+against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had
+at once set out to join him. She was a very pretty, sad, unsmiling
+young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband's partner
+questions about the new home. His answers, while they did not seem
+to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained
+safely in her London suburb.
+
+Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron
+pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her.
+
+The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and
+shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes
+staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow,
+another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the
+partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in
+white under the bridge.
+
+The husband and the young wife were swung together over the side to
+the lifting waves in a two-seated "mammy chair," like one of those
+_vis-a-vis_ swings you see in public playgrounds and picnic groves,
+and they carried with them, as a gift from Captain Burton, a fast
+melting lump of ice, the last piece of fresh meat they will taste in
+many a day, and the blessings of all the ship's company. And then,
+with inhospitable haste there was a rattle of anchor chains, a quick
+jangle of bells from the bridge to the engine-room, and the
+_Bruxellesville_ swept out to sea, leaving the girl from the London
+suburb to find her way into the heart of Africa. Next morning we
+anchored in a dripping fog off Sekondi on the Gold Coast, to allow
+an English doctor to find his way to a fever camp. For nine years he
+had been a Coaster, and he had just gone home to fit himself, by a
+winter's vacation in London, for more work along the Gold Coast. It
+is said of him that he has "never lost a life." On arriving in
+London he received a cable telling him three doctors had died, the
+miners along the railroad to Ashanti were rotten with fever, and
+that he was needed.
+
+ [Illustration: The "Mammy Chair" is Like Those Swings You See in
+ Public Playgrounds.]
+
+So he and his wife, as cheery and bright as though she were setting
+forth on her honeymoon, were going back to take up the white man's
+burden. We swung them over the side as we had the other two, and
+that night in the smoking-room the Coasters drank "Luck to him,"
+which, in the vernacular of this unhealthy shore, means "Life to
+him," and to the plucky, jolly woman who was going back to fight
+death with the man who had never lost a life.
+
+As the ship was getting under way, a young man in "whites" and a sun
+helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by
+which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled
+recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his
+helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt;
+that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for
+he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding
+as though we had been old acquaintances.
+
+"You going far?" he asked. He spoke in the soft, detached voice of
+the public-school Englishman.
+
+"To the Congo," I answered.
+
+He stood swaying with the ship, looking as though there were
+something he wished to say, and then laughed, and added gravely,
+giving me the greeting of the Coast: "Luck to you."
+
+"Luck to YOU," I said.
+
+That is the worst of these gaddings about, these meetings with men
+you wish you could know, who pass like a face in the crowded street,
+who hold out a hand, or give the password of the brotherhood, and
+then drop down the sea ladder and out of your life forever.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
+
+
+To me, the fact of greatest interest about the Congo is that it is
+owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned by
+one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not
+trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that
+in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it.
+Though backed by all the mailed fists in the German Empire, and all
+the _Dreadnoughts_ of the seas, no other modern monarch would make
+such a claim. It does not sound like anything we have heard since
+the days and the ways of Pharaoh. And the most remarkable feature of
+it is, that the man who makes this claim is the man who was placed
+over the Congo as a guardian, to keep it open to the trade of the
+world, to suppress slavery. That, in the Congo, he has killed trade
+and made the products of the land his own, that of the natives he
+did not kill he has made slaves, is what to-day gives the Congo its
+chief interest. It is well to emphasize how this one man stole a
+march on fourteen Powers, including the United States, and stole
+also an empire of one million square miles.
+
+Twenty-five years ago all of Africa was divided into many parts. The
+part which still remained to be distributed among the Powers was
+that which was watered by the Congo River and its tributaries.
+
+Along the north bank of the Congo River ran the French Congo; the
+Portuguese owned the lands to the south, and on the east it was shut
+in by protectorates and colonies of Germany and England. It was, and
+is, a territory as large, were Spain and Russia omitted, as Europe.
+Were a map of the Congo laid upon a map of Europe, with the mouth of
+the Congo River where France and Spain meet at Biarritz, the
+boundaries of the Congo would reach south to the heel of Italy, to
+Greece, to Smyrna; east to Constantinople and Odessa; northeast to
+St. Petersburg and Finland, and northwest to the extreme limits of
+Scotland. Distances in this country are so enormous, the means of
+progress so primitive, that many of the Belgian officers with whom I
+came south and who already had travelled nineteen days from Antwerp,
+had still, before they reached their posts, to steam, paddle, and
+walk for three months.
+
+In 1844 to dispose amicably of this great territory, which was much
+desired by several of the Powers, a conference was held at Berlin.
+There it was decided to make of the Congo Basin an Independent
+State, a "free-for-all" country, where every flag could trade with
+equal right, and with no special tariff or restriction.
+
+The General Act of this conference agreed: "The trade of ALL nations
+shall enjoy complete freedom." "No Power which exercises or shall
+exercise Sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions shall be
+allowed to _grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters
+of trade_." "ALL the Powers exercising Sovereign rights or influence
+in the afore-said territories bind themselves to watch over the
+preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement
+of _the condition of their moral and material welfare_, and _to
+help in suppressing slavery_." The italics are mine. These
+quotations from the act are still binding upon the fourteen Powers,
+including the United States.
+
+For several years previous to the Conference of Berlin, Leopold of
+Belgium, as a private individual, had shown much interest in the
+development of the Congo. The opening up of that territory was
+apparently his hobby. Out of his own pocket he paid for expeditions
+into the Congo Basin, employed German and English explorers, and
+protested against the then existing iniquities of the Arabs, who for
+ivory and slaves raided the Upper Congo. Finally, assisted by many
+geographical societies, he founded the International Association, to
+promote "civilization and trade" in Central Africa; and enlisted
+Henry M. Stanley in this service.
+
+That, in the early years, Leopold's interest in the Congo was
+unselfish may or may not be granted, but, knowing him, as we now
+know him, as one of the shrewdest and, of speculators, the most
+unscrupulous, at the time of the Berlin Conference, his self-seeking
+may safely be accepted. Quietly, unostentatiously, he presented
+himself to its individual members as a candidate for the post of
+administrator of this new territory.
+
+On the face of it he seemed an admirable choice. He was a sovereign
+of a kingdom too unimportant to be feared; of the newly created
+State he undoubtedly possessed an intimate knowledge. He promised to
+give to the Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders, already for many
+years established on the Congo, his heartiest aid, and, for those
+traders still to come, to maintain the "open door." His professions
+of a desire to help the natives were profuse. He became the
+unanimous choice of the conference.
+
+Later he announced to the Powers signing the act, that from Belgium
+he had received the right to assume the title of King of the
+Independent State of the Congo. The Powers recognized his new title.
+
+The fact that Leopold, King of Belgium, was king also of the Etat
+Independant du Congo confused many into thinking that the Free State
+was a colony, or under the protection, of Belgium. As we have seen,
+it is not. A Belgian may serve in the army of the Free State, or in
+a civil capacity, as may a man of any nation, but, although with few
+exceptions only Belgians are employed in the Free State, and
+although to help the King in the Congo, the Belgian Government has
+loaned him great sums of money, politically and constitutionally the
+two governments are as independent of each other as France and
+Spain.
+
+And so, in 1885, Leopold, by the grace of fourteen governments, was
+appointed their steward over a great estate in which each of the
+governments still holds an equal right; a trustee and keeper over
+twenty millions of "black brothers" whose "moral and material
+welfare" each government had promised to protect.
+
+There is only one thing more remarkable than the fact that Leopold
+was able to turn this public market into a private park, and that
+is, that he has been permitted to do so. It is true he is a man of
+wonderful ability. For his own ends he is a magnificent organizer.
+But in the fourteen governments that created him there have been,
+and to-day there are, men, if less unscrupulous, of quite as great
+ability; statesmen, jealous and quick to guard the rights of the
+people they represent, people who since the twelfth century have
+been traders, who since 1808 have declared slavery abolished.
+
+And yet, for twenty-five years these statesmen have watched Leopold
+disobey every provision in the act of the conference. Were they to
+visit the Congo, they could see for themselves the jungle creeping
+in and burying their trading posts, their great factories turned
+into barracks. They know that the blacks they mutually agreed to
+protect have been reduced to slavery worse than that they suffered
+from the Arabs, that hundreds of thousands of them have fled from
+the Congo, and that those that remain have been mutilated, maimed,
+or, what was more merciful, murdered. And yet the fourteen
+governments, including the United States, have done nothing.
+
+Some tell you they do not interfere because they are jealous one of
+the other; others say that it is because they believe the Congo will
+soon be taken over by Belgium, and with Belgium in control, they
+argue, they would be dealing with a responsible government, instead
+of with a pirate. But so long as Leopold is King of Belgium one
+doubts if Belgians in the Congo would rise above the level of their
+King. The English, when asked why they do not assert their rights,
+granted not only to them, but to thirteen other governments, reply
+that if they did they would be accused of "ulterior motives." What
+ulterior motives? If you pursue a pickpocket and recover your watch
+from him, are your motives in doing so open to suspicion?
+
+Personally, although this is looking some way ahead, I would like to
+see the English take over and administrate the Congo. Wherever I
+visit a colony governed by Englishmen I find under their
+administration, in spite of opium in China and gin on the West
+Coast, that three people are benefited: the Englishman, the native,
+and the foreign trader from any other part of the world. Of the
+colonies of what other country can one say the same?
+
+As a rule our present governments are not loath to protect their
+rights. But toward asserting them in the Congo they have been moved
+neither by the protests of traders, chambers of commerce,
+missionaries, the public press, nor by the cry of the black man to
+"let my people go." By only those in high places can it be
+explained. We will leave it as a curious fact, and return to the
+"Unjust Steward."
+
+His first act was to wage wars upon the Arabs. From the Soudan and
+from the East Coast they were raiding the Congo for slaves and
+ivory, and he drove them from it. By these wars he accomplished two
+things. As the defender of the slave, he gained much public credit,
+and he kept the ivory. But war is expensive, and soon he pointed out
+to the Powers that to ask him out of his own pocket to maintain
+armies in the field and to administer a great estate was unfair. He
+humbly sought their permission to levy a few taxes. It seemed a
+reasonable request. To clear roads, to keep boats upon the great
+rivers, to mark it with buoys, to maintain wood stations for the
+steamers, to improve the "moral and material welfare of the
+natives," would cost money, and to allow Leopold to bring about
+these improvements, which would be for the good of all, he was
+permitted to levy the few taxes. That was twenty years ago; to-day I
+saw none of these improvements, and the taxes have increased.
+
+From the first they were so heavy that the great trade houses, which
+for one hundred years in peace and mutual goodwill bartered with the
+natives, found themselves ruined. It was not alone the export taxes,
+lighterage dues, port dues, and personal taxes that drove them out
+of the Congo; it was the King appearing against them as a rival
+trader, the man appointed to maintain the "open door." And a trader
+with methods they could not or would not imitate. Leopold, or the
+"State," saw for the existence of the Congo only two reasons: Rubber
+and Ivory. And the collecting of this rubber and ivory was, as he
+saw it, the sole duty of the State and its officers. When he threw
+over the part of trustee and became the Arab raider he could not
+waste his time, which, he had good reason to fear, might be short,
+upon products that, if fostered, would be of value only in later
+years. Still less time had he to give to improvements that cost
+money and that would be of benefit to his successors. He wanted only
+rubber; he wanted it at once, and he cared not at all how he
+obtained it. So he spun, and still spins, the greatest of all
+"get-rich-quick" schemes; one of gigantic proportions, full of
+tragic, monstrous, nauseous details.
+
+The only possible way to obtain rubber is through the native; as
+yet, in teeming forests, the white man can not work and live. Of
+even Chinese coolies imported here to build a railroad ninety per
+cent. died. So, with a stroke of the pen, Leopold declared all the
+rubber in the country the property of the "State," and then, to make
+sure that the natives would work it, ordered that taxes be paid in
+rubber. If, once a month (in order to keep the natives steadily at
+work the taxes were ordered to be paid each month instead of once a
+year), each village did not bring in so many baskets of rubber the
+King's cannibal soldiers raided it, carried off the women as
+hostages, and made prisoners of the men, or killed and ate them. For
+every kilo of rubber brought in in excess of the quota the King's
+agent, who received the collected rubber and forwarded it down the
+river, was paid a commission. Or was "paid by results." Another
+bonus was given him based on the price at which he obtained the
+rubber. If he paid the native only six cents for every two pounds,
+he received a bonus of three cents, the cost to the State being but
+nine cents per kilo, but, if he paid the natives twelve cents for
+every two pounds, he received as a bonus less than one cent. In a
+word, the more rubber the agent collected the more he personally
+benefited, and if he obtained it "cheaply" or for nothing--that is,
+by taking hostages, making prisoners, by the whip of hippopotamus
+hide, by torture--so much greater his fortune, so much richer
+Leopold.
+
+ [Illustration: A Village on the Kasai River.]
+
+Few schemes devised have been more cynical, more devilish, more
+cunningly designed to incite a man to cruelty and abuse. To
+dishonesty it was an invitation and a reward. It was this system of
+"payment by results," evolved by Leopold sooner than allow his
+agents a fixed and sufficient wage, that led to the atrocities.
+
+One result of this system was that in seven years the natives
+condemned to slavery in the rubber forests brought in rubber to the
+amount of fifty-five millions of dollars. But its chief results were
+the destruction of entire villages, the flight from their homes in
+the Congo of hundreds of thousands of natives, and for those that
+remained misery, death, the most brutal tortures and degradations,
+unprintable, unthinkable.
+
+I am not going to enter into the question of the atrocities. In the
+Congo the tip has been given out from those higher up at Brussels to
+"close up" the atrocities; and for the present the evil places in
+the Tenderloin and along the Broadway of the Congo are tightly shut.
+But at those lonely posts, distant a month to three months' march
+from the capital, the cruelties still continue. I did not see them.
+Neither, last year, did a great many people in the United States see
+the massacre of blacks in Atlanta. But they have reason to believe
+it occurred. And after one has talked with the men and women who
+have seen the atrocities, has seen in the official reports that
+those accused of the atrocities do not deny having committed them,
+but point out that they were merely obeying orders, and after one
+has seen that even at the capital of Boma all the conditions of
+slavery exist, one is assured that in the jungle, away from the
+sight of men, all things are possible. Merchants, missionaries, and
+officials even in Leopold's service told me that if one could spare
+a year and a half, or a year, to the work in the hinterland he would
+be an eye-witness of as cruel treatment of the natives as any that
+has gone before, and if I can trust myself to weigh testimony and
+can believe my eyes and ears I have reason to know that what they
+say is true. I am convinced that to-day a man, who feels that a year
+and a half is little enough to give to the aid of twenty millions of
+human beings, can accomplish in the Congo as great and good work as
+that of the Abolitionists.
+
+Three years ago atrocities here were open and above-board. For
+instance. In the opinion of the State the soldiers, in killing game
+for food, wasted the State cartridges, and in consequence the
+soldiers, to show their officers that they did not expend the
+cartridges extravagantly on antelope and wild boar, for each empty
+cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or
+child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts
+along the river. They are no longer in evidence. Neither is the
+flower-bed of Lieutenant Dom, which was bordered with human skulls.
+A quaint conceit.
+
+The man to blame for the atrocities, for each separate atrocity, is
+Leopold. Had he shaken his head they would have ceased. When the hue
+and cry in Europe grew too hot for him and he held up his hand they
+did cease. At least along the main waterways. Years before he could
+have stopped them. But these were the seven fallow years, when
+millions of tons of red rubber were being dumped upon the wharf at
+Antwerp; little, roughly rolled red balls, like pellets of
+coagulated blood, which had cost their weight in blood, which would
+pay Leopold their weight in gold.
+
+He can not plead ignorance. Of all that goes on in his big
+plantation no man has a better knowledge. Without their personal
+honesty, he follows every detail of the "business" of his rubber
+farm with the same diligence that made rich men of George Boldt and
+Marshall Field. Leopold's knowledge is gained through many spies, by
+voluminous reports, by following up the expenditure of each centime,
+of each arm's-length of blue cloth. Of every Belgian employed on
+his farm, and ninety-five per cent. are Belgians, he holds the
+_dossier_; he knows how many kilos a month the agent whips out of
+his villages, how many bottles of absinthe he smuggles from the
+French side, whether he lives with one black woman or five, why his
+white wife in Belgium left him, why he left Belgium, why he dare not
+return. The agent knows that Leopold, King of the Belgians, knows,
+and that he has shared that knowledge with the agent's employer, the
+man who by bribes of rich bonuses incites him to crime, the man who
+could throw him into a Belgian jail, Leopold, King of the Congo.
+
+The agent decides for him it is best to please both Leopolds, and
+Leopold makes no secret of what best pleases him. For not only is he
+responsible for the atrocities, in that he does not try to suppress
+them, but he is doubly guilty in that he has encouraged them. This
+he has done with cynical, callous publicity, without effort at
+concealment, without shame. Men who, in obtaining rubber, committed
+unspeakable crimes, the memory of which makes other men
+uncomfortable in their presence, Leopold rewarded with rich
+bonuses, pensions, higher office, gilt badges of shame, and rapid
+advancement. To those whom even his own judges sentenced to many
+years' imprisonment he promptly granted the royal pardon, promoted,
+and sent back to work in the vineyard.
+
+"That is the sort of man for _me_," his action seemed to say. "See
+how I value that good and faithful servant. That man collected much
+rubber. You observe I do not ask how he got it. I will not ask you.
+All you need do is to collect rubber. Use our improved methods. Gum
+copal rubbed in the kinky hair of the chief and then set on fire
+burns, so my agents tell me, like vitriol. For collecting rubber the
+chief is no longer valuable, but to his successor it is an
+object-lesson. Let me recommend also the _chicotte_, the torture
+tower, the 'hostage' house, and the crucifix. Many other stimulants
+to labor will no doubt suggest themselves to you and to your
+cannibal 'sentries.' Help to make me rich, and don't fear the
+'State.' '_L'Etat, c'est moi!_' Go as far as you like!"
+
+I said the degradations and tortures practised by the men "working
+on commission" for Leopold are unprintable, but they have been
+printed, and those who wish to read a calmly compiled, careful, and
+correct record of their deeds will find it in the "Red Rubber" of
+Mr. E.R. Morel. An even better book by the same authority, on the
+whole history of the State, is his "King Leopold's Rule in the
+Congo." Mr. Morel has many enemies. So, early in the nineteenth
+century, had the English Abolitionists, Wilberforce and Granville
+Sharp. After they were dead they were buried in the Abbey, and their
+portraits were placed in the National Gallery. People who wish to
+assist in freeing twenty millions of human beings should to-day
+support Mr. Morel. It will be of more service to the blacks than,
+after he is dead, burying him in Westminster Abbey.
+
+Mr. Morel, the American and English missionaries, and the English
+Consul, Roger Casement, and other men, in Belgium, have made a
+magnificent fight against Leopold; but the Powers to whom they have
+appealed have been silent. Taking courage of this silence, Leopold
+has divided the Congo into several great territories in which the
+sole right to work rubber is conceded to certain persons. To those
+who protested that no one in the Congo "Free" State but the King
+could trade in rubber, Leopold, as an answer, pointed with pride at
+the preserves of these foreigners. And he may well point at them
+with pride, for in some of those companies he owns a third, and in
+most of them he holds a half, or a controlling interest. The
+directors of the foreign companies are his cronies, members of his
+royal household, his brokers, bankers. You have only to read the
+names published in the lists of the Brussels Stock Exchange to see
+that these "trading companies," under different aliases, are
+Leopold. Having, then, "conceded" the greater part of the Congo to
+himself, Leopold set aside the best part of it, so far as rubber is
+concerned, as a _Domaine Prive_. Officially the receipts of this pay
+for running the government, and for schools, roads and wharfs, for
+which taxes were levied, but for which, after twenty years, one
+looks in vain. Leopold claims that through the Congo he is out of
+pocket; that this carrying the banner of civilization in Africa
+does not pay. Through his press bureaus he tells that his sympathy
+for his black brother, his desire to see the commerce of the world
+busy along the Congo, alone prevents him giving up what is for him a
+losing business. There are several answers to this. One is that in
+the Kasai Company alone Leopold owns 2,010 shares of stock. Worth
+originally $50 a share, the value of each share rose to $3,100,
+making at one time his total shares worth $5,421,000. In the
+A.B.I.R. Concession he owns 1,000 shares, originally worth $100
+each, later worth $940. In the "vintage year" of 1900 each of these
+shares was worth $5,050, and the 1,000 shares thus rose to the value
+of $5,050,000.
+
+These are only two companies. In most of the others half the shares
+are owned by the King.
+
+As published in the "State Bulletin," the money received in eight
+years for rubber and ivory gathered in the _Domaine Prive_ differs
+from the amount given for it in the market at Antwerp. The official
+estimates show a loss to the government. The actual sales show that
+the government, over and above its own estimate of its expenses,
+instead of losing, made from the _Domaine Prive_ alone $10,000,000.
+We are left wondering to whom went that unaccounted-for $10,000,000.
+Certainly the King would not take it, for, to reimburse himself for
+his efforts, he early in the game reserved for himself another tract
+of territory known as the _Domaine de la Couronne_. For years he
+denied that this existed. He knew nothing of Crown Lands. But, at
+last, in the Belgian Chamber, it was publicly charged that for years
+from this private source, which he had said did not exist, Leopold
+had been drawing an income of $15,000,000. Since then the truth of
+this statement has been denied, but at the time in the Chamber it
+was not contradicted.
+
+To-day, grown insolent by the apathy of the Powers, Leopold finds
+disguising himself as a company, as a laborer worthy of his hire,
+irksome. He now decrees that as "Sovereign" over the Congo all of
+the Congo belongs to him. It is as much his property as is a
+pheasant drive, as is a staked-out mining claim, as your hat is your
+property. And the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are there
+only on his sufferance. They are his "tenants." He permits each
+the hut in which he lives, and the garden adjoining that hut, but
+his work must be for Leopold, and everything else, animal, mineral,
+or vegetable, belongs to Leopold. The natives not only may not sell
+ivory or rubber to independent traders, but if it is found in their
+possession it is seized; and if you and I bought a tusk of ivory
+here it would be taken from us and we could be prosecuted. This is
+the law. Other men rule over territories more vast even than the
+Congo. The King of England rules an empire upon which the sun never
+sets. But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even
+the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could
+not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going
+into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa
+and saying: "This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must
+not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American. If they
+buy from you they are 'receivers of stolen goods.' To feed my
+soldiers you must drag my river for my fish. For me, in my swamp and
+in my jungle, you must toil twenty-four days of each month to
+gather my rubber. You must not hunt the elephants, for they are my
+elephants. Those tusks that fifty years ago your grandfather, with
+his naked spear, cut from an elephant, and which you have tried to
+hide from me under the floor of this hut, are my ivory. Because that
+elephant, running wild through the jungle fifty years ago, belonged
+to me. And you yourself are mine, your time is mine, your labor is
+mine, your wife, your children, all are mine. They belong to me."
+
+ [Illustration: "Tenants" of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
+ Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
+ Tenants.]
+
+This, then, is the "open door" as I find it to-day in the Congo. It
+is an incredible state of affairs, so insolent, so magnificent in
+its impertinence, that it would be humorous, were it not for its
+background of misery and suffering, for its hostage houses, its
+chain gangs, its _chicottes_, its nameless crimes against the human
+body, its baskets of dried hands held up in tribute to the Belgian
+blackguard.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO
+
+
+Leopold's "shop" has its front door at Banana. Its house flag is a
+golden star on a blue background. Banana is the port of entry to the
+Congo. You have, no doubt, seen many ports of Europe--Antwerp,
+Hamburg, Boulogne, Lisbon, Genoa, Marseilles. Banana is the port of
+entry to a country as large as Western Europe, and while the imports
+and exports of Europe trickle through all these cities, the commerce
+of the Congo enters and departs entirely at Banana. You can then
+picture the busy harbor, the jungle of masts, the white bridges and
+awnings of the steamers. By the fat funnels and the flags you can
+distinguish the English tramps, the German merchantmen, the French,
+Dutch, Italian, Portuguese traders, the smart "liners" from
+Liverpool, even the Arab dhows with bird-wing sails, even the steel,
+four-masted schooners out of Boston, U.S.A. You can imagine the
+toiling lighters, the slap-dash tenders, the launches with shrieking
+whistles.
+
+Of course, you suspect it is not a bit like that. But were it for
+fourteen countries the "open door" to twenty millions of people,
+that is how it might look.
+
+Instead, it is the private entrance to the preserves of a private
+individual. So what you really see is, on the one hand, islands of
+mangrove bushes, with their roots in the muddy water; on the other,
+Banana, a strip of sand and palm trees without a wharf, quay,
+landing stage, without a pier to which you could make fast anything
+larger than a rowboat.
+
+In a canoe naked natives paddle alongside to sell fish; a peevish
+little man in a sun hat, who, in order to save Leopold three
+salaries, holds four port offices, is being rowed to the gangway; on
+shore the only other visible inhabitant of Banana, a man with no
+nerves, is disturbing the brooding, sweating silence by knocking the
+rust off the plates of a stranded mud-scow. Welcome to our city!
+Welcome to busy, bustling Banana, the port of entry of the Congo
+Free State.
+
+ [Illustration: The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
+ Entry to the Congo, Are Limited.]
+
+In a canoe we were paddled to the back yard of the cafe of Madame
+Samuel, and from that bower of warm beer and sardine tins trudged
+through the sun up one side of Banana and down the other. In between
+the two paths were the bungalows and gardens of forty white men and
+two white women. Many of the gardens, as was most of Banana, were
+neglected, untidy, littered with condensed-milk tins. Others, more
+carefully tended, were laid out in rigid lines. With all tropical
+nature to draw upon, nothing had been imagined. The most ambitious
+efforts were designs in whitewashed shells and protruding beer
+bottles. We could not help remembering the gardens in Japan, of the
+poorest and the most ignorant coolies. Do I seem to find fault with
+Banana out of all proportion to its importance? It is because
+Banana, the Congo's most advanced post of civilization, is typical
+of all that lies beyond.
+
+From what I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy,
+malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy,
+monotonous, depressing.
+
+But on the way to Boma and, later, when I travelled on the Upper
+Congo, I thought the river more beautiful than any great river I had
+ever seen. It was full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes it ran
+between palm-covered banks of yellow sand as low as those of the
+Mississippi or the Nile; and again, in half an hour, the banks were
+rock and as heavily wooded as the mountains of Montana, or as white
+and bold as the cliffs of Dover, or we passed between great hills,
+covered with what looked like giant oaks, and with their peaks
+hidden in the clouds. I found it like no other river, because in
+some one particular it was like them all. Between Banana and Boma
+the banks first screened us in with the tangled jungle of the
+tropics, and then opened up great wind-swept plateaux, leading to
+hills that suggested--of all places--England, and, at that,
+cultivated England. The contour of the hills, the shape of the
+trees, the shade of their green contrasted with the green of the
+grass, were like only the cliffs above Plymouth. One did not look
+for native kraals and the wild antelope, but for the square,
+ivy-topped tower of the village church, the loaf-shaped hayricks,
+slow-moving masses of sheep. But this that looks like a pasture
+land is only coarse limestone covered with bitter, unnutritious
+grass, which benefits neither beast nor man.
+
+At sunset we anchored in the current three miles from Boma, and at
+daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the
+government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor,
+who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper
+and as a king by divine right. He is a figurehead. The real
+administrator is M. Vandamme, the Secretaire-General, the
+ubiquitous, the mysterious, whose name before you leave Southampton
+is in the air, of whom all men, whether they speak in French or
+English, speak well. It is from Boma that M. Vandamme sends
+collectors of rubber, politely labeled inspecteurs, directeurs,
+judges, capitaines, and sous-lieutenants to their posts, and
+distributes them over one million square miles.
+
+Boma is the capital of a country which is as large as six nations of
+the European continent. For twenty-five years it has been the
+capital. Therefore, the reader already guesses that Boma has only
+one wharf, and at that wharf there is no custom-house, no warehouse,
+not even a canvas awning under which, during the six months of rainy
+season, one might seek shelter for himself and his baggage.
+
+Our debarkation reminded me of a landing of filibusters. A wharf
+forty yards long led from the steamer to the bank. Down this marched
+the officers of the army, the clerks, the bookkeepers, and on the
+bank and in the street each dumped his boxes, his sword, his
+camp-bed, his full-dress helmet. It looked as though a huge eviction
+had taken place, as though a retreating army, having gained the
+river's edge, were waiting for a transport. It was not as though to
+the government the coming of these gentlemen was a complete
+surprise; regularly every three weeks at that exact spot a like
+number disembark. But in years the State has not found it worth
+while to erect for them even an open zinc shed. The cargo invoiced
+to the State is given equal consideration.
+
+"Prisoners of the State," each wearing round his neck a steel ring
+from which a chain stretches to the ring of another "prisoner,"
+carried the cargo to the open street, where lay the luggage of the
+officers, and there dropped it. Mingled with steamer chairs, tin
+bathtubs, gun-cases, were great crates of sheet iron, green boxes of
+gin, bags of Teneriffe potatoes, boilers of an engine. Upon the
+scene the sun beat with vicious, cruel persistence. Those officers
+who had already served in the Congo dropped their belongings under
+the shadow of a solitary tree. Those who for the first time were
+seeing the capital of the country they had sworn to serve sank upon
+their boxes and, with dismay in their eyes, mopped their red and
+dripping brows.
+
+ [Illustration: "Prisoners" of the State in Chains at Matadi.]
+
+Boma is built at the foot of a hill of red soil. It is a town of
+scattered buildings made of wood and sheet-iron plates, sent out in
+crates, and held together with screws. To Boma nature has been
+considerate. She has contributed many trees, two or three long
+avenues of palms, and in the many gardens caused flowers to blossom
+and flourish. In the report of the "Commission of Enquiry" which
+Leopold was forced to send out in 1904 to investigate the
+atrocities, and each member of which, for his four months' work,
+received $20,000, Boma is described as possessing "the daintiness
+and _chic_ of a European watering-place."
+
+Boma really is like a seaport of one of the Central American republics.
+It has a temporary sufficient-to-the-day-for-to-morrow-we-die air.
+It looks like a military post that at any moment might be abandoned.
+To remove this impression the State has certain exhibits which seem
+to point to a stable and good government. There is a well-conducted
+hospital and clean, well-built barracks; for the amusement of the
+black soldiers even a theatre, and for the higher officials
+attractive bungalows, a bandstand, where twice a week a negro band
+plays by ear, and plays exceedingly well. There is even a
+lawn-tennis court, where the infrequent visitor to the Congo is
+welcomed, and, by the courteous Mr. Vandamme, who plays tennis as
+well as he does every thing else, entertained. Boma is the shop
+window of Leopold's big store. The good features of Boma are like
+those attractive articles one sometimes sees in a shop window, but
+which in the shop one fails to find--at least, I did not find them
+in the shop. Outside of Boma I looked in vain for a school
+conducted by the State, like the one at Boma, such as those the
+United States Government gave by the hundred to the Philippines. I
+found not one. And I looked for such a hospital as the one I saw at
+Boma, such as our government has placed for its employes along, and
+at both ends of, the Isthmus of Panama, and, except for the one at
+Leopoldville, I saw none.
+
+In spite of the fact that Boma is a "European watering-place," all
+the servants of the State with whom I talked wanted to get away from
+it, especially those who already had served in the interior. To
+appreciate what Boma lacks one has only to visit the neighboring
+seaports on the same coast; the English towns of Sierra Leone and
+Calabar, the French town of Libreville in the French Congo, the
+German seaport Duala in the Cameroons, but especially Calabar in
+Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years
+younger than Boma, and in its municipal government, its
+street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons,
+hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital;
+it is the distributing factory for a huge trading concern, and a
+particularly selfish one. There is, as I have said, only one wharf,
+and at that wharf, without paying the State, only State boats may
+discharge cargo, so the English, Dutch, and German boats are forced
+to "tie up" along the river front. There the grass is eight feet
+high and breeds mosquitoes and malaria, and conceals the wary
+crocodile. At night, from the deck of the steamer, all one can see
+of this capital is a fringe of this high grass in the light from the
+air ports, and on shore three gas-lamps. No cafes are open, no
+sailors carouse, no lighted window suggests that some one is giving
+a dinner, that some one is playing bridge. Darkness, gloom, silence
+mark this "European watering-place."
+
+"You ask me," demanded a Belgian lieutenant one night as we stood
+together by the rail, "whether I like better the bush, where there
+is no white man in a hundred miles, or to be stationed at Boma?"
+
+He threw out his hands at the gas-lamps, rapidly he pointed at each
+of them in turn.
+
+"Voila, Boma!" he said.
+
+From Boma we steamed six hours farther up the river to Matadi. On
+the way we stopped at Noqui, the home of Portuguese traders on the
+Portuguese bank, which, as one goes up-stream, lies to starboard.
+Here the current runs at from four to five miles an hour, and has so
+sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with
+the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used
+more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to
+see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank
+looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her
+propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, cutting
+the eel-grass.
+
+At Matadi the Congo makes one of her lightning changes. Her banks,
+which have been low and woody, with, on the Portuguese side,
+glimpses of boundless plateaux, become towering hills of rock. At
+Matadi the cataracts and rapids begin, and for two hundred miles
+continue to Stanley Pool, which is the beginning of the Upper Congo.
+Leopoldville is situated on Stanley Pool, just to the right of where
+the rapids start their race to the south. With Leopoldville above
+and Boma below, still nearer the mouth of the river, Matadi makes a
+centre link in the chain of the three important towns of the Lower
+Congo.
+
+When Henry M. Stanley was halted by the cataracts and forced to
+leave the river he disembarked his expedition on the bank opposite
+Matadi, and a mile farther up-stream. It was from this point he
+dragged and hauled his boats, until he again reached smooth water at
+Stanley Pool. The wagons on which he carried the boats still can be
+seen lying on the bank, broken and rusty. Like the sight of old gun
+carriages and dismantled cannon, they give one a distinct thrill.
+Now, on the bank opposite from where they lie, the railroad runs
+from Matadi to Leopoldville.
+
+The Congo forces upon one a great admiration for Stanley. Unless
+civilization utterly alters it, it must always be a monument to his
+courage, and as you travel farther and see the difficulties placed
+in his way, your admiration increases. There are men here who make
+little of what Stanley accomplished; but they are men who seldom
+leave their own compound, and, who, when they do go up the river,
+travel at ease, not in a canoe, or on foot through the jungle, but
+in the smoking-room of the steamer and in a first-class railroad
+carriage. That they are able so to travel is due to the man they
+would belittle. The nickname given to Stanley by the natives is
+to-day the nickname of the government. Matadi means rock. When
+Stanley reached the town of Matadi, which is surrounded entirely by
+rock, he began with dynamite to blast roads for his caravan. The
+natives called him Bula Matadi, the Breaker of Rocks, and, as in
+those days he was the Government, the Law, and the Prophets, Bula
+Matadi, who then was the white man who governed, now signifies the
+white man's government. But it is a very different government, and a
+very different white man. With the natives the word is universal.
+They say "Bula Matadi wood post." "Not traders' chop, Bula Matadi's
+chop." "Him no missionary steamer, him Bula Matadi steamer."
+
+The town of Matadi is of importance as the place where, owing to the
+rapids, passengers and cargoes are reshipped on the railroad to the
+_haut Congo_. It is a railroad terminus only, and it looks it. The
+railroad station and store-houses are close to the river bank, and,
+spread over several acres of cinders, are the railroad yard and
+machine shops. Above those buildings of hot corrugated zinc and the
+black soil rises a great rock. It is not so large as Gibraltar, or
+so high as the Flatiron Building, but it is a little more steep than
+either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat
+stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove
+lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their
+surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your
+stomach, and the soles of your mosquito boots. The three streets
+lead to a parade ground no larger than and as bare as a brickyard.
+It is surrounded by the buildings of Bula Matadi, the post-office,
+the custom-house, the barracks, and the Cafe Franco-Belge. It has a
+tableland fifty yards wide of yellow clay so beaten by thousands of
+naked feet, so baked by the heat, that it is as hard as a brass
+shield. Other tablelands may be higher, but this is the one nearest
+the sun. You cross it wearily, in short rushes, with your heart in
+your throat, and seeking shade, as a man crossing the zone of fire
+seeks cover from the bullets. When you reach the cool, dirty
+custom-house, with walls two feet thick, you congratulate yourself
+on your escape; you look back into the blaze of the flaming plaza
+and wonder if you have the courage to return.
+
+ [Illustration: Bush Boys in the Plaza at Matadi Seeking Shade.]
+
+At the custom-house I paid duty on articles I could not possibly
+have bought anywhere in the Congo, as, for instance, a tent and a
+folding-bed, and for a license to carry arms. A young man with a
+hammer and tiny branding irons beat little stars and the number of
+my license to _porter d'armes_ on the stock of each weapon. Without
+permission of Bula Matadi on leaving the Congo, one can not sell his
+guns, or give them away. This is a precaution to prevent weapons
+falling into the hands of the native. For some reason a native with
+a gun alarms Bula Matadi. Just on the other bank of the river the
+French, who do not seem to fear the black brother, sell him
+flint-lock rifles, as many as his heart desires.
+
+On the steamer there was a mild young missionary coming out, for the
+first time, to whom some unobserving friend had given a fox-terrier.
+The young man did not care for the dog. He had never owned a dog,
+and did not know what to do with this one. Her name was "Fanny,"
+and only by the efforts of all on board did she reach the Congo
+alive. There was no one, from the butcher to the captain, including
+the passengers, who had not shielded Fanny from the cold, and later
+from the sun, fed her, bathed her, forced medicine down her throat,
+and raced her up and down the spar deck. Consequently we all knew
+Fanny, and it was a great shock when from the custom-house I saw her
+running around the blazing parade ground, her eyes filled with fear
+and "lost dog" written all over her, from her drooping tongue to her
+drooping tail. Captain Burton and I called "Fanny," and, not seeking
+suicide for ourselves, sent half a dozen black boys to catch her.
+But Fanny never liked her black uncles; on the steamer the Kroo boys
+learned to give her the length of her chain, and so we were forced
+to plunge to her rescue into the valley of heat. Perhaps she thought
+we were again going to lock her up on the steamer, or perhaps that
+it was a friendly game, for she ran from us as fast as from the
+black boys. In Matadi no one ever had crossed the parade ground
+except at a funeral march, and the spectacle of two large white
+men playing tag with a small fox-terrier attracted an immense
+audience. The officials and clerks left work and peered between the
+iron-barred windows, the "prisoners" in chains ceased breaking rock
+and stared dumbly from the barracks, the black "sentries" shrieked
+and gesticulated, the naked bush boys, in from a long caravan
+journey, rose from the side of their burdens and commented upon our
+manoeuvres in gloomy, guttural tones. I suspect they thought we
+wanted Fanny for "chop." Finally Fanny ran into the legs of a German
+trader, who grabbed her by the neck and held her up to us.
+
+"You want him? Hey?" he shouted.
+
+"Ay, man," gasped Burton, now quite purple, "did you think we were
+trying to amuse the dog?"
+
+I made a leash of my belt, and the captain returned to the ship
+dragging his prisoner after him. An hour later I met the youthful
+missionary leading Fanny by a rope.
+
+"I must tell you about Fanny," he cried. "After I took her to the
+Mission I forgot to tie her up--as I suppose I should have done--and
+she ran away. But, would you believe it, she found her way straight
+back to the ship. Was it not intelligent of her?"
+
+I was too far gone with apoplexy, heat prostration, and sunstroke to
+make any answer, at least one that I could make to a missionary.
+
+The next morning Fanny, the young missionary, and I left for
+Leopoldville on the railroad. It is a narrow-gauge railroad built
+near Matadi through the solid rock and later twisting and turning so
+often that at many places one can see the track on three different
+levels. It is not a State road, but was built and is owned by a
+Dutch company, and, except that it charges exorbitant rates and does
+not keep its carriages clean, it is well run, and the road-bed is
+excellent. But it runs a passenger train only three times a week,
+and though the distance is so short, and though the train starts at
+6:30 in the morning, it does not get you to Leopoldville the same
+day. Instead, you must rest over night at Thysville and start at
+seven the next morning. That afternoon at three you reach
+Leopoldville. For the two hundred and fifty miles the fare is two
+hundred francs, and one is limited to sixty pounds of luggage. That
+was the weight allowed by the Japanese to each war correspondent,
+and as they gave us six months in Tokio in which to do nothing else
+but weigh our equipment, I left Matadi without a penalty. Had my
+luggage exceeded the limit, for each extra pound I would have had to
+pay the company ten cents. To the Belgian officers and agents who go
+for three years to serve the State in the bush the regulation is
+especially harsh, and in a company so rich, particularly mean. To
+many a poor officer, and on the pay they receive there are no rich
+ones, the tax is prohibitive. It forces them to leave behind
+medicines, clothing, photographic supplies, all ammunition, which
+means no chance of helping out with duck and pigeon the daily menu
+of goat and tinned sausages, and, what is the greatest hardship, all
+books. This regulation, which the State permitted to the
+concessionaires of the railroad, sends the agents of the State into
+the wilderness physically and mentally unequipped, and it is no
+wonder the weaker brothers go mad, and act accordingly.
+
+My black boys travelled second-class, which means an open car with
+narrow seats very close together and a wooden roof. On these cars
+passengers are allowed twenty pounds of luggage and permitted to
+collect two hundred and fifty miles of heat and dust. To a black boy
+twenty pounds is little enough, for he travels with much more
+baggage than an average "blanc." I am not speaking of the Congo boy.
+All the possessions the State leaves him he could carry in his
+pockets, and he has no pockets. But wherever he goes the Kroo boy,
+Mendi boy, or Sierra Leone boy carries all his belongings with him
+in a tin trunk painted pink, green, or yellow. He is never separated
+from his "box," and the recognized uniform of a Kroo boy at work, is
+his breechcloth, and hanging from a ribbon around his knee, the key
+to his box. If a boy has no box he generally carries three keys.
+
+In the first-class car were three French officers en route to
+Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo, and a dog, a sad
+mongrel, very dirty, very hungry. On each side of the tiny toy car
+were six revolving-chairs, so the four men, not to speak of the dog,
+quite filled it. And to our own bulk each added hand-bags, cases of
+beer, helmets, gun-cases, cameras, water-bottles, and, as the road
+does not supply food of any kind, his chop-box. A chop-box is
+anything that holds food, and for food of every kind, for the hours
+of feeding, and the verb "to feed," on the West Coast, the only
+word, the "lazy" word, is "chop."
+
+The absent-minded young missionary, with Fanny jammed between his
+ankles, and looking out miserably upon the world, and two other
+young missionaries, travelled second-class.
+
+They were even more crowded together than were we, but not so much
+with luggage as with humanity. But as a protest against the high
+charges of the railroad the missionaries always travel in the open
+car. These three young men were for the first time out of England,
+and in any fashion were glad to start on their long journey up the
+Congo to Bolobo. To them whatever happened was a joke. It was a joke
+even when the colored "wife" of one of the French officers used the
+broad shoulders of one of them as a pillow and slept sweetly. She
+was a large, good-natured, good-looking mulatto, and at the frequent
+stations the French officer ran back to her with "white man's chop,"
+a tin of sausages, a pineapple, a bottle of beer. She drank the
+beer from the bottle, and with religious tolerance offered it to the
+Baptists. They assured her without the least regret that they were
+teetotalers. To the other blacks in the open car the sight of a
+white man waiting on one of their own people was a thrilling
+spectacle. They regarded the woman who could command such services
+with respect. It would be interesting to know what they thought of
+the white man. At each station the open car disgorged its occupants
+to fill with water the beer bottle each carried, and to buy from the
+natives kwango, the black man's bread, a flaky, sticky flour that
+tastes like boiled chestnuts; and pineapples at a franc for ten. And
+such pineapples! Not hard and rubber-like, as we know them at home,
+but delicious, juicy, melting in the mouth like hothouse grapes,
+and, also, after each mouthful, making a complete bath necessary.
+One of the French officers had a lump of ice which he broke into
+pieces and divided with the others. They saluted magnificently many
+times, and as each drowned the morsel in his tin cup of beer, one of
+them cried with perfect simplicity: "C'est Paris!" This reminded me
+that the ship's steward had placed much ice in my chop basket, and I
+carried some of it to another car in which were five of the White
+Sisters. For nineteen days I had been with them on the steamer, but
+they had spoken to no one, and I was doubtful how they would accept
+my offering. But the Mother Superior gave permission, and they took
+the ice through the car window, their white hoods bristling with the
+excitement of the adventure. They were on their way to a post still
+two months' journey up the river, nearly to Lake Tanganyika, and for
+three years or, possibly, until they died, that was the last ice
+they would see.
+
+At Bongolo station the division superintendent came in the car and
+everybody offered him refreshment, and in return he told us, in the
+hope of interesting us, of a washout, and then casually mentioned
+that an hour before an elephant had blocked the track. It seemed so
+much too good to be true that I may have expressed some doubt, for
+he said: "Why, of course and certainly. Already this morning one was
+at Sariski Station and another at Sipeto." And instead of looking
+out of the window I had been reading an American magazine, filched
+from the smoking-room, which was one year old!
+
+At Thysville the railroad may have opened a hotel, but when I was
+there to hunt for a night's shelter it turned you out bag and
+baggage. The French officers decided to risk a Portuguese trading
+store known as the "Ideal Hotel," and the missionaries very kindly
+gave me the freedom of their Rest House. It is kept open for
+those of the Mission who pass between the Upper and Lower Congo.
+At the station the young missionaries were met by two older
+missionaries--Mr. Weekes, who furnished the "Commission of Enquiry"
+with much evidence, which they would not, or were not allowed to,
+print, and Mr. Jennings. With them were twenty "boys" from the
+Mission and, with each of them carrying a piece of our baggage on
+his head, we climbed the hill, and I was given a clean, comfortable,
+completely appointed bedroom. Our combined chop we turned over to a
+black brother. He is the custodian of the Rest House and an
+excellent cook. While he was preparing it my boys spread out my
+folding rubber tub. Had I closed the door I should have smothered,
+so, in the presence of twenty interested black Baptists, I took an
+embarrassing but one of the most necessary baths I can remember.
+
+There still was a piece of the ice remaining, and as the interest in
+the bathtub had begun to drag I handed it to one of my audience. He
+yelled as though I had thrust into his hand a drop of vitriol, and,
+leaping in the air, threw the ice on the floor and dared any one to
+touch it. From the "personal" boys who had travelled to Matadi the
+Mission boys had heard of ice. But none had ever seen it. They
+approached it as we would a rattlesnake. Each touched it and then
+sprang away. Finally one, his eyes starting from his head,
+cautiously stroked the inoffensive brick and then licked his
+fingers. The effect was instantaneous. He assured the others it was
+"good chop," and each of them sat hunched about it on his heels,
+stroking it, and licking his fingers, and then with delighted
+thrills rubbing them over his naked body. The little block of ice
+that at Liverpool was only a "quart of water" had assumed the value
+of a diamond.
+
+Dinner was enlivened by an incident. Mr. Weekes, with orders simply
+to "fry these," had given to the assistant of the cook two tins of
+sausages. The small _chef_ presented them to us in the pan in which
+he had cooked them, but he had obeyed instructions to the letter and
+had fried the tins unopened.
+
+After dinner we sat until late, while the older men told the young
+missionaries of atrocities of which, in the twenty years and within
+the last three years, they had been witnesses. Already in Mr.
+Morel's books I had read their testimony, but hearing from the men
+themselves the tales of outrage and cruelty gave them a fresh and
+more intimate value, and sent me to bed hot and sick with
+indignation. But, nevertheless, the night I slept at Thysville was
+the only cool one I knew in the Congo. It was as cool as is a night
+in autumn at home. Thysville, between the Upper and the Lower Congo,
+with its fresh mountain air, is an obvious site for a hospital for
+the servants of the State. To the Congo it should be what Simla is
+to the sick men of India; but the State is not running hospitals. It
+is in the rubber business.
+
+All steamers for the Upper Congo and her great tributaries, whether
+they belong to the State or the Missions, start from Leopoldville.
+There they fit out for voyages, some of which last three and four
+months. So it is a place of importance, but, like Boma, it looks as
+though the people who yesterday built it meant to-morrow to move
+out. The river-front is one long dump-heap. It is a grave-yard for
+rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars. The interior of the
+principal storehouse for ships' supplies, directly in front of the
+office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old
+iron and newspapers. I should have enjoyed taking the captain of the
+port by the neck and showing him the water-front and marine shops at
+Calabar; the wharfs and quays of stone, the open places spread with
+gravel, the whitewashed cement gutters, the spare parts of
+machinery, greased and labeled in their proper shelves, even the
+condemned scrap-iron in orderly piles; the whole yard as trim as a
+battleship.
+
+On the river-front at Leopoldville a grossly fat man, collarless,
+coatless, purple-faced, perspiring, was rushing up and down. He was
+the captain of the port. Black women had assembled to greet
+returning black soldiers, and the captain was calling upon the black
+sentries to drive them away. The sentries, yelling, fell upon the
+women with their six-foot staves and beat them over the head and
+bare shoulders, and as they fled, screaming, the captain of the port
+danced in the sun shaking his fists after them and raging violently.
+Next morning I was told he had tried to calm his nerves with
+absinthe, which is not particularly good for nerves, and was
+exceedingly unwell. I was sorry for him. The picture of discipline
+afforded by the glazed-eyed official, reeling and cursing in the
+open street, had been illuminating.
+
+Although at Leopoldville the State has failed to build wharfs, the
+esthetic features of the town have not been neglected, and there is
+a pretty plaza called Stanley Park. In the centre of this plaza is a
+pillar with, at its base, a bust of Leopold, and on the top of the
+pillar a plaster-of-Paris lady, nude, and, not unlike the
+Bacchante of MacMonnies. Not so much from the likeness as from
+history, I deduced that the lady must be Cleo de Merode. But whether
+the monument is erected to her or to Leopold, or to both of them, I
+do not know.
+
+ [Illustration: The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
+ Stanley, but to Leopold.]
+
+I left Leopoldville in the _Deliverance_. Some of the State boats
+that make the long trip to Stanleyville are very large ships. They
+have plenty of deck room and many cabins. With their flat, raft-like
+hull, their paddle-wheel astern, and the covered sun deck, they
+resemble gigantic house-boats. Of one of these boats the
+_Deliverance_ was only one-third the size, but I took passage on her
+because she would give me a chance to see not only something of the
+Congo, but also one of its great tributaries, the less travelled
+Kasai. The _Deliverance_ was about sixty-five feet over all and drew
+three feet of water. She was built like a mud-scow, with a deck of
+iron plates. Amidships, on this deck, was a tiny cabin with berths
+for two passengers and standing room for one. The furnaces and
+boiler were forward, banked by piles of wood. All the river boats
+burn only wood. Her engines were in the stern. These engines and the
+driving-rod to the paddle-wheel were uncovered. This gives the
+_Deliverance_ the look of a large automobile without a tonneau. You
+were constantly wondering what had gone wrong with the carbureter,
+and if it rained what would happen to her engines. Supported on iron
+posts was an upper deck, on which, forward, stood the captain's box
+of a cabin and directly in front of it the steering-wheel. The
+telegraph, which signalled to the openwork engine below, and a
+dining table as small as a chess-board, completely filled the
+"bridge." When we sat at table the captain's boy could only just
+squeeze himself between us and the rail. It was like dining in a
+private box. And certainly no theatre ever offered such scenery, nor
+did any menagerie ever present so many strange animals.
+
+We were four white men: Captain Jensen, his engineer, and the other
+passenger, Captain Anfossi, a young Italian. Before he reached his
+post he had to travel one month on the _Deliverance_ and for another
+month walk through the jungle. He was the most cheerful and amusing
+companion, and had he been returning after three years of exile to
+his home he could not have been more brimful of spirits. Captain
+Jensen was a Dane (almost every river captain is a Swede or a Dane)
+and talked a little English, a little French, and a little Bangala.
+The mechanician was a Finn and talked the native Bangala, and
+Anfossi spoke French. After chop, when we were all assembled on the
+upper deck, there would be the most extraordinary talks in four
+languages, or we would appoint one man to act as a clearing-house,
+and he would translate for the others.
+
+On the lower deck we carried twenty "wood boys," whose duty was to
+cut wood for the furnace, and about thirty black passengers. They
+were chiefly soldiers, who had finished their period of service for
+the State, with their wives and children. They were crowded on the
+top of the hatches into a space fifteen by fifteen feet between our
+cabin door and the furnace. Around the combings of the hatches, and
+where the scuppers would have been had the _Deliverance_ had
+scuppers, the river raced over the deck to a depth of four or five
+inches. When the passengers wanted to wash their few clothes or
+themselves they carried on their ablutions and laundry work where
+they happened to be sitting. But for Anfossi and myself to go from
+our cabin to the iron ladder of the bridge it was necessary to wade
+both in the water and to make stepping stones of the passengers. I
+do not mean that we merely stepped over an occasional arm or leg. I
+mean we walked on them. You have seen a football player, in a hurry
+to make a touchdown, hurdle without prejudice both friends and foes.
+Our progress was like this. But by practice we became so expert that
+without even awakening them we could spring lightly from the plump
+stomach of a black baby to its mother's shoulder, from there leap to
+the father's ribs, and rebound upon the rungs of the ladder.
+
+ [Illustration: The _Deliverance_.]
+
+The river marched to the sea at the rate of four to five miles an
+hour. The _Deliverance_ could make about nine knots an hour, so we
+travelled at the average rate of five miles; but for the greater
+part of each day we were tied to a bank while the boys went ashore
+and cut enough wood to carry us farther. And we never travelled at
+night. Owing to the changing currents, before the sun set we ran
+into shore and made fast to a tree. I explained how in America the
+river boats used search-lights, and was told that on one boat the
+State had experimented with a searchlight, but that particular
+searchlight having got out of order the idea of night travelling was
+condemned.
+
+Ours was a most lazy progress, but one with the most beautiful
+surroundings and filled with entertainment. From our private box we
+looked out upon the most wonderful of panoramas. Sometimes we were
+closely hemmed in by mountains of light-green grass, except where,
+in the hollows, streams tumbled in tiny waterfalls between gigantic
+trees hung with strange flowering vines and orchids. Or we would
+push into great lakes of swirling brown water, dotted with flat
+islands overgrown with reed grass higher than the head of a man.
+Again the water turned blue and the trees on the banks grew into
+forests with the look of cultivated, well-cared-for parks, but with
+no sign of man, not even a mud hut or a canoe; only the strangest of
+birds and the great river beasts. Sometimes the sky was overcast and
+gray, the warm rain shut us in like a fog, and the clouds hid the
+peaks of the hills, or there would come a swift black tornado and
+the rain beat into our private box, and each would sit crouched in
+his rain coat, while the engineer smothered his driving-rods in palm
+oil, and the great drops drummed down upon the awning and drowned
+the fire in our pipes. After these storms, as though it were being
+pushed up from below, the river seemed to rise in the centre, to
+become convex. By some optical illusion, it seemed to fall away on
+either hand to the depth of three or four feet.
+
+But as a rule we had a brilliant, gorgeous sunshine that made the
+eddying waters flash and sparkle, and caused the banks of sand to
+glare like whitewashed walls, and turn the sharp, hard fronds of the
+palms into glittering sword-blades. The movement of the boat
+tempered the heat, and in lazy content we sat in our lookout box and
+smiled upon the world. Except for the throb of the engine and the
+slow splash, splash, splash of the wheel there was no sound. We
+might have been adrift in the heart of a great ocean. So complete
+was the silence, so few were the sounds of man's presence, that at
+times one almost thought that ours was the first boat to disturb the
+Congo.
+
+Although we were travelling by boat, we spent as much time on land
+as on the water. Because the _Deliverance_ burnt wood and, like an
+invading army, "lived on the country," she was always stopping to
+lay in a supply. That gave Anfossi and myself a chance to visit the
+native villages or to hunt in the forest.
+
+To feed her steamers the State has established along the river-bank
+posts for wood, and in theory at these places there always is a
+sufficient supply of wood to carry a steamer to the next post. But
+our experience was either that another steamer had just taken all
+the wood or that the boys had decided to work no more and had hidden
+themselves in the bush. The State posts were "clearings," less than
+one hundred yards square, cut out of the jungle. Sometimes only
+black men were in charge, but as a rule the _chef de poste_ was a
+lonely, fever-ridden white, whose only interest in our arrival was
+his hope that we might spare him quinine. I think we gave away as
+many grains of quinine as we received logs of wood. Empty-handed we
+would turn from the wood post and steam a mile or so farther up the
+river, where we would run into a bank, and a boy with a steel hawser
+would leap overboard and tie up the boat to the roots of a tree.
+Then all the boys would disappear into the jungle and attack the
+primeval forest. Each was supplied with a machete and was expected
+to furnish a _bras_ of wood. A _bras_ is a number of sticks about as
+long and as thick as your arm, placed in a pile about three feet
+high and about three feet wide. To fix this measure the head boy
+drove poles into the bank three feet apart, and from pole to pole at
+the same distance from the ground stretched a strip of bark. When
+each boy had filled one of these openings all the wood was carried
+on board, and we would unhitch the _Deliverance_, and she would
+proceed to burn up the fuel we had just collected. It took the
+twenty boys about four hours to cut the wood, and the _Deliverance_
+the same amount of time to burn it. It was distinctly a
+hand-to-mouth existence. As I have pointed out, when it is too dark
+to see the currents, the Congo captains never attempt to travel. So
+each night at sunset Captain Jensen ran into the bank, and as soon
+as the plank was out all the black passengers and the crew passed
+down it and spent the night on shore. In five minutes the women
+would have the fires lighted and the men would be cutting grass
+for bedding and running up little shelters of palm boughs and
+hanging up linen strips that were both tents and mosquito nets.
+
+ [Illustration: The Native Wife of a _Chef de Poste_.]
+
+In the moonlight the natives with their camp-fires and torches made
+most wonderful pictures. Sometimes for their sleeping place the
+captain would select a glade in the jungle, or where a stream had
+cut a little opening in the forest, or a sandy island, with tall
+rushes on either side and the hot African moon shining on the white
+sand and turning the palms to silver, or they would pitch camp in a
+buffalo wallow, where the grass and mud had been trampled into a
+clay floor by the hoofs of hundreds of wild animals. But the fact
+that they were to sleep where at sunrise and at sunset came
+buffaloes, elephants, and panthers, disturbed the women not at all,
+and as they bent, laughing, over the iron pots, the firelight shone
+on their bare shoulders and was reflected from their white teeth and
+rolling eyes and brazen bangles.
+
+Until late in the night the goats would bleat, babies cry, and the
+"boys" and "mammies" talked, sang, quarrelled, beat tom-toms, and
+squeezed mournful groans out of the accordion of civilization. One
+would have thought we had anchored off a busy village rather than at
+a place where, before that night, the inhabitants had been only the
+beasts of the jungle and the river.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+AMERICANS IN THE CONGO
+
+
+In trying to sum up what I found in the Congo Free State, I think
+what one fails to find there is of the greatest significance. To
+tell what the place is like, you must tell what it lacks. One must
+write of the Congo always in the negative. It is as though you
+asked: "What sort of a house is this one Jones has built?" and were
+answered: "Well, it hasn't any roof, and it hasn't any cellar, and
+it has no windows, floors, or chimneys. It's that kind of a house."
+
+When first I arrived in the Congo the time I could spend there
+seemed hopelessly inadequate. After I'd been there a month, it
+seemed to me that in a very few days any one could obtain a
+painfully correct idea of the place, and of the way it is
+administered. If an orchestra starts on an piece of music with all
+the instruments out of tune, it need not play through the entire
+number for you to know that the instruments are out of tune.
+
+The charges brought against Leopold II, as King of the Congo, are
+three:
+
+(_a_) That he has made slaves of the twenty million blacks he
+promised to protect.
+
+(_b_) That, in spite of his promise to keep the Congo open to trade,
+he has closed it to all nations.
+
+(_c_) That the revenues of the country and all of its trade he has
+retained for himself.
+
+Any one who visits the Congo and remains only two weeks will be
+convinced that of these charges Leopold is guilty. In that time he
+will not see atrocities, but he will see that the natives are
+slaves, that no foreigner can trade with them, that in the interest
+of Leopold alone the country is milked.
+
+He will see that the government of Leopold is not a government. It
+preserves the perquisites and outward signs of government. It coins
+money, issues stamps, collects taxes. But it assumes none of the
+responsibilities of government. The Congo Free State is only a great
+trading house. And in it Leopold is the only wholesale and retail
+trader. He gives a bar of soap for rubber, and makes a "turn-over"
+of a cup of salt for ivory. He is not a monarch. He is a shopkeeper.
+
+And were the country not so rich in rubber and ivory, were the
+natives not sweated so severely, he also would be a bankrupt
+shopkeeper. For the Congo is not only one vast trading post, but
+also it is a trading post badly managed. Even in the republics of
+Central America where the government changes so frequently, and
+where each new president is trying to make hay while he can, there
+is better administration, more is done for the people, the rights of
+other nations are better respected.
+
+Were the Congo properly managed, it would be one of the richest
+territories on the surface of the earth. As it is, through ignorance
+and cupidity, it is being despoiled and its people are the most
+wretched of human beings. In the White Book containing the reports
+of British vice-consuls on conditions in the Congo from April of
+last year to January of this year, Mr. Mitchell tells how the
+enslavement of the people still continues, how "they" (the
+conscripts, as they are called) "are hunted in the forest by
+soldiers, and brought in chained by the neck like criminals." They
+then, though conscripted to serve in the army, are set to manual
+labor. They are slaves. The difference between the slavery under
+Leopold and the slavery under the Arab raiders is that the Arab was
+the better and kinder master. He took "prisoners" just as Leopold
+seizes "conscripts," but he had too much foresight to destroy whole
+villages, to carry off all the black man's live stock, and to uproot
+his vegetable gardens. He purposed to return. And he did not wish to
+so terrify the blacks that to escape from him they would penetrate
+farther into the jungle. His motive was purely selfish, but his
+methods, compared with those of Leopold, were almost considerate.
+The work the State to-day requires of the blacks is so oppressive
+that they have no time, no heart, to labor for themselves.
+
+In every other colony--French, English, German--in the native
+villages I saw vegetable gardens, goats, and chickens, large,
+comfortable, three-room huts, fences, and, especially in the German
+settlement of the Cameroons at Duala, many flower gardens. In Bell
+Town at Duala I walked for miles through streets lined with such
+huts and gardens, and saw whole families, the very old as well as
+the very young, sitting contentedly in the shade of their trees, or
+at work in their gardens. In the Congo native villages I saw but one
+old person, of chickens or goats that were not to be given to the
+government as taxes I saw none, and the vegetable gardens, when
+there were any such, were cultivated for the benefit of the _chef de
+poste_, and the huts were small, temporary, and filthy. The dogs in
+the kennels on my farm are better housed, better fed, and much
+better cared for, whether ill or well, than are the twenty millions
+of blacks along the Congo River. And that these human beings are so
+ill-treated is due absolutely to the cupidity of one man, and to the
+apathy of the rest of the world. And it is due as much to the apathy
+and indifference of whoever may read this as to the silence of Elihu
+Root or Sir Edward Grey. No one can shirk his responsibility by
+sneering, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The Government of the United
+States and the thirteen other countries have promised to protect
+these people, to care for their "material and moral welfare," and
+that promise is morally binding upon the people of those countries.
+How much Leopold cares for the material welfare of the natives is
+illustrated by the prices he pays the "boys" who worked on the
+government steamer in which I went up the Kasai. They were bound on
+a three months' voyage, and for each month's work on this trip they
+were given in payment their rice and eighty cents. That is, at the
+end of the trip they received what in our money would be equivalent
+to two dollars and forty cents. And that they did not receive in
+money, but in "trade goods," which are worth about ten per cent less
+than their money value. So that of the two dollars and eighty cents
+that is due them, these black boys, who for three months sweated in
+the dark jungle cutting wood, are robbed by this King of twenty-four
+cents. One would dislike to grow rich at that price.
+
+ [Illustration: English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges.]
+
+In the French Congo I asked the traders at Libreville what they paid
+their boys for cutting mahogany. I found the price was four francs a
+day without "chop," or three and a half francs with "chop." That
+is, on one side of the river the French pay in cash for one day's
+work what Leopold pays in trade goods for the work of a month. As a
+result the natives run away to the French side, and often, I might
+almost say invariably, when at the _poste de bois_ on the Congo side
+we would find two cords of wood, on the other bank at the post for
+the French boats we would count two hundred and fifty cords of wood.
+I took photographs of the native villages in all the colonies, in
+order to show how they compared--of the French and Belgian wood
+posts, the one well stocked and with the boys lying about asleep or
+playing musical instruments, or alert to trade and barter, and on
+the Belgian side no wood, and the unhappy white man alone, and
+generally shivering with fever. Had the photographs only developed
+properly they would have shown much more convincingly than one can
+write how utterly miserable is the condition of the Congo negro. And
+the condition of the white man at the wood posts is only a little
+better. We found one man absolutely without supplies. He was only
+twenty-four hours distant from Leopoldville, but no supplies had
+been sent him. He was ill with fever, and he could eat nothing but
+milk. Captain Jensen had six cans of condensed milk, which the State
+calculated should suffice for him and his passengers for three
+months. He turned the lot over to the sick man.
+
+We found another white man at the first wood post on the Kasai just
+above where it meets the Congo. He was in bed and dangerously ill
+with enteric fever. He had telegraphed the State at Leopoldville and
+a box of medicines had been sent to him; but the State doctors had
+forgotten to enclose any directions for their use. We were as
+ignorant of medicines as the man himself, and, as it was impossible
+to move him, we were forced to leave him lying in his cot with the
+row of bottles and tiny boxes, that might have given him life,
+unopened at his elbow. It was ten days before the next boat would
+touch at his post. I do not know that it reached him in time. One
+could tell dozens of such stories of cruelty to natives and of
+injustice and neglect to the white agents.
+
+The fact that Leopold has granted to American syndicates control
+over two great territories in the Congo may bring about a better
+state of affairs, and, in any event, it may arouse public interest
+in this country. It certainly should be of interest to Americans
+that some of the most prominent of their countrymen have gone into
+close partnership with a speculator as unscrupulous and as notorious
+as is Leopold, and that they are to exploit a country which as yet
+has been developed only by the help of slavery, with all its
+attendant evils of cruelty and torture.
+
+That Leopold has no right to give these concessions is a matter
+which chiefly concerns the men who are to pay for them, but it is an
+interesting fact.
+
+The Act of Berlin expressly states: _"No Power which exercises, or
+shall exercise, sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions,
+shall be allowed to grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in
+matters of trade."_
+
+Leopold is only a steward placed by the Powers over the Congo. He is
+a janitor. And he has no more authority to give even a foot of
+territory to Belgians, Americans, or Chinamen than the janitor of an
+apartment house has authority to fill the rooms with his wife's
+relations or sell the coal in the basement.
+
+The charge that the present concessionaires have no title that any
+independent trader or miner need respect is one that is sure to be
+brought up when the Powers throw Leopold out, and begin to clean
+house. The concessionaires take a sporting chance that Leopold will
+not be thrown out. It should be remembered that it is to his and to
+their advantage to see that he is not.
+
+In November of 1906, Leopold gave the International Forestry and
+Mining Company of the Congo mining rights in territories adjoining
+his private park, the _Domaine de la Couronne_, and to the American
+Congo Company he granted the right to work rubber along the Congo
+River to where it joins the Kasai. This latter is a territory of
+four thousand square miles. The company also has the option within
+the next eleven years of buying land in any part of a district which
+is nearly one-half of the entire Congo. Of the Forestry and Mining
+Company one-half of the profits go to Leopold, one-fourth to
+Belgians, and the remaining fourth to the Americans. Of the profits
+of the American Congo Company, Leopold is entitled to one-half and
+the Americans to the other half. This company was one originally
+organized to exploit a new method of manufacturing crude rubber from
+the plant. The company was taken over by Thomas F. Ryan and his
+associates. Back of both companies are the Guggenheims, who are to
+perform the actual work in the mines and in the rubber plantation.
+Early in March a large number of miners and engineers were selected
+by John Hays Hammond, the chief engineer of the Guggenheim
+Exploration Companies, and A. Chester Beatty, and were sent to
+explore the territory granted in the mining concession. Another
+force of experts are soon to follow. The legal representative of the
+syndicates has stated that in the Congo they intend to move "on
+commercial lines." By that we take it they mean they will give the
+native a proper price for his labor; and instead of offering
+"bonuses" and "commissions" to their white employees will pay them
+living wages. The exact terms of the concessions are wrapped in
+mystery. Some say the territories ceded to the concessionaires are
+to be governed by them, policed by them, and that within the
+boundaries of these concessions the Americans are to have absolute
+control. If this be so the syndicates are entering upon an
+experiment which for Americans is almost without precedent. They
+will be virtually what in England is called a chartered company,
+with the difference that the Englishmen receive their charter from
+their own government, while the charter under which the Americans
+will act will be granted by a foreign Power, and for what they may
+do in the Congo their own government could not hold them
+responsible. They are answerable only to the Power that issued the
+charter; and that Power is the just, the humane, the merciful
+Leopold.
+
+The history of the early days of chartered companies in Africa,
+notoriously those of the Congo, Northern Nigeria, Rhodesia, and
+German Central Africa does not make pleasant reading. But until the
+Americans in the Congo have made this experiment, it would be most
+unfair (except that the company they choose to keep leaves them open
+to suspicion) not to give them the benefit of the doubt. One can at
+least say for them that they seem to be absolutely ignorant of the
+difficulties that lie before them. At least that is true of all of
+them to whom I have talked.
+
+The attorney of the Rubber Company when interviewed by a
+representative of a New York paper is reported to have said: "We
+have purchased a privilege from a Sovereign State and propose to
+operate it along purely commercial lines. With King Leopold's
+management of Congo affairs in the past, or, with _what he may do in
+an administrative way in the future, we have absolutely nothing to
+do_." The italics are mine.
+
+When asked: "Under your concessions are you given similar powers
+over the native blacks as are enjoyed by other concessionaires?" the
+answer of the attorney, as reported, was: "The problem of labor is
+not mentioned in the concession agreement, neither is the question
+of local administration. We are left to solve the labor problem in
+our own way, on a purely commercial basis, and with the question of
+government we have absolutely nothing whatever to do. The labor
+problem will not be formidable. Our mills are simple affairs. One
+man can manage them, and the question of the labor on the rubber
+concession is reduced to the minimum." This answer of the learned
+attorney shows an ignorance of "labor" conditions in the Congo which
+is, unless assumed, absolutely abject.
+
+If the American syndicates are not to police and govern the
+territories ceded them, but if these territories are to continue to
+be administered by Leopold, it is not possible for the Americans to
+have "absolutely nothing to do" with that administration. Leopold's
+sole idea of administration is that every black man is his slave, in
+other words, the only men the Americans can depend upon for labor
+are slaves. Of the profits of these American companies Leopold is to
+receive one-half. He will work his rubber with slaves.
+
+Are the Americans going to use slaves also, or do they intend "on
+commercial lines" to pay those who work for them living wages? And
+if they do, at the end of the fiscal year, having paid a fair price
+for labor, are they prepared to accept a smaller profit than will
+their partner Leopold, who obtains his labor with the aid of a chain
+and a whip?
+
+ [Illustration: The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
+ Concessionaires Must Depend.]
+
+The attorney for the company airily says: "The labor problem will
+not be formidable."
+
+If the man knows what he is talking about, he can mean but one
+thing.
+
+The motives that led Leopold to grant these concessions are possibly
+various. The motives that induced the Americans to take his offer
+were probably less complicated. With them it was no question of
+politics. They wanted the money; they did not need it, for they all
+are rich--they merely wanted it. But Leopold wants more than the
+half profits he will obtain from the Americans. If the Powers should
+wake from their apathy and try to cast him out of the Congo, he
+wants, through his American partners, the help of the United States.
+Should he be "dethroned," by granting these concessions now on a
+share and share alike basis with Belgians, French, and Americans, he
+still, through them, hopes to draw from the Congo a fair income. And
+in the meanwhile he looks to these Americans to kill any action
+against him that may be taken in our Senate and House of
+Representatives, even in the White House and Department of State.
+
+For the last two years Chester A. Beatty has been visiting Leopold
+at Belgium, and has obtained the two concessions, and Leopold has
+obtained, or hopes he has obtained, the influence of many American
+shareholders. The fact that the people of the United States
+possessed no "vested interest" in the Congo was the important fact
+that placed any action on our part in behalf of that distressed
+country above suspicion. If we acted, we did so because the United
+States, as one of the signatory Powers of the Berlin Act, had
+promised to protect the natives of the Congo; and we could truly
+claim that we acted only in the name of humanity. Leopold has now
+robbed us of that claim. He hopes that the enormous power wielded by
+the Americans with whom he is associated, will prevent any action
+against him in this country.
+
+But the deal has already been made public, and the motives of those
+who now oppose improvement of conditions in the Congo, and who
+support Leopold, will be at once suspected.
+
+To me the most interesting thing about the tract of land ceded to
+Mr. Ryan, apart from the number of hippopotamuses I saw on it, was
+that the people living along the Congo say that it is of no value.
+They told me that two years ago, after working it for some time,
+Leopold abandoned it as unprofitable, and they added that, when
+Leopold cannot whip rubber out of the forest, it is hard to believe
+that it can be obtained there legitimately by any one else. On the
+bank I saw the "factories" to which the unprofitable rubber had been
+carried from the interior. They had formerly belonged to Leopold,
+now they are the property of Mr. Ryan and of the American Congo
+Company. In only two years they already are in ruins, and the jungle
+has engulfed them.
+
+I was on the land owned by the company a dozen times or more, but I
+did not go into the interior. Even had I done so, I am not an expert
+on rubber, and would have understood nothing of Para trees, Lagos
+silk, and liane. I am speaking not of my own knowledge, only of what
+was told me by people who live on the spot. I found that this
+particular concession was well known, because, unlike the land given
+to the Forestry and Mines Company, it is not an inaccessible tract,
+but is situated only eight miles from Leopoldville. In our language,
+that is about as far as is the Battery to 160th Street. Leopoldville
+is the chief place on the Congo River, and every one there who spoke
+to me of the concession knew where it was situated, and repeated
+that it had been given up by Leopold as unprofitable, and that he
+had unloaded it on Mr. Ryan. They seem to think it very clever of
+the King to have got rid of it to the American millionaire. To one
+knowing Mr. Ryan only from what he reads of him in the public press,
+he does not seem to be the sort of man to whom Leopold could sell a
+worthless rubber plantation. However, it is a matter which concerns
+only Mr. Ryan and those who may think of purchasing shares in the
+company. The Guggenheims, who are to operate this rubber, say that
+Leopold did not know how to get out the full value of the land, and
+that they, by using the machinery they will install, will be able to
+make a profit, where Leopold, using only native labor, suffered a
+loss.
+
+To the poor the ways of the truly rich are past finding out. After a
+man has attained a fortune sufficient to keep him in yachts and
+automobiles, one would think he could afford to indulge himself in
+the luxury of being squeamish; that as to where he obtained any
+further increase of wealth, he would prefer to pick and choose.
+
+On the contrary, these Americans go as far out of their way as
+Belgium to make a partner of the man who has wrung his money from
+wretched slaves, who were beaten, starved, and driven in chains.
+This concession cannot make them rich. It can only make them richer.
+And not richer in fact, for all the money they may whip out of the
+Congo could not give them one thing that they cannot now command,
+not an extra taste to the lips, not a fresh sensation, not one added
+power for good. To them it can mean only a figure in ink on a page
+of a bank-book. But what suffering, what misery it may mean to the
+slaves who put it there! Why should men as rich as these elect to go
+into partnership with one who sweats his dollars out of the naked
+black? How really fine, how really wonderful it would be if these
+same men, working together, decided to set free these twenty million
+people--if, instead of joining hands with Leopold, they would
+overthrow him and march into the Congo free men, without his chain
+around their ankles, and open it to the trade of the world, and give
+justice and a right to live and to work and to sell and buy to
+millions of miserable human beings. These Americans working together
+could do it. They could do it from Washington. Or five hundred men
+with two Maxim guns could do it. The "kingdom" of the Congo is only
+a house of cards. Five hundred filibusters could take Boma, proclaim
+the Congo open to the traders of the world, as the Act of Berlin
+declares it to be, and in a day make of Leopold the jest of Europe.
+They would only be taking possession of what has always belonged to
+them.
+
+Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
+They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty,
+or crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven
+by any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
+degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
+risking life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows,
+and for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great.
+They had the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity.
+One of them picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the
+wrist of his tunic, and said: "Look, it is our badge of shame."
+
+To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
+home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men
+and brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will,
+safe in their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard
+King.
+
+What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
+Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
+possible, a greater evil?
+
+E.R. Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the
+improvement of the Congo, has written: "It is a little difficult to
+imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of
+Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in
+slave-driving. The trouble is that they probably know nothing about
+African conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his
+detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis
+that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere
+'laborers' for the white man's benefit, possessing no rights in land
+nor in the produce of the soil. If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are
+going to acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by
+'commercial methods,' we welcome their advent. But we would point
+out to them that, in such a case, they had better at once abandon
+all idea of three or four hundred per cent dividends with which the
+wily autocrat at Brussels has doubtless primed them. No such
+monstrous profits are to be acquired in tropical Africa under a
+trade system. If, on the other hand, the methods they are prepared
+to adopt are the methods King Leopold and his other concessionaires
+have adopted for the past thirteen years, devastation and
+destruction, and the raising of more large bodies of soldiers, are
+their essential accompaniments; and the widening of the area of the
+Congo hell is assured."
+
+The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise
+good to that unhappy country are that our country is represented at
+Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the
+person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual
+work of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the
+Guggenheims. They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as
+philanthropists and humanitarians of the common-sense type. Like
+other rich men of their race, they have given largely to charity and
+to assist those less fortunate than themselves.
+
+For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they
+have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it
+successfully. Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with
+fairness.
+
+"Why should you suppose," Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, "that in
+the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly? In Mexico we found the
+natives ill-paid and ill-fed. We fed them and paid them well. Not
+from any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business. It is
+not good business to cut off a workman's hands or head. We are not
+ashamed of the way we have always treated our workmen, and in the
+Congo we are not going to spoil our record."
+
+I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold,
+tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway
+to his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his
+agents might do there he could not possibly know. To this Mr.
+Guggenheim answered that "Neither Leopold nor anyone else can
+dictate how we shall treat the native labor," that if his agents
+were cruel they would be instantly dismissed, and that for what
+occurred in the Congo on the land occupied by the American Congo
+Company his brothers and himself alone were responsible, and that
+they accepted that responsibility.
+
+But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him
+into trouble, men of whose _dossiers_ he is quite ignorant.
+
+From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several
+of his "valets du roi," press agents, and tools, men who for years
+have been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the
+Americans, one, who is prominently exploited by the Belgians, had
+to leave Africa for theft.
+
+That Mr. Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the
+Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt. But that on
+Broadway, removed from the scene of operations in time some four to
+six months, and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can
+control the acts of his agents and his partners, remains to be
+proved. He is attacking a problem much more momentous than the
+handling of Mexican _peons_ or Chinese coolies, and every step of
+the working out of this problem will be watched by the people of
+this country.
+
+And should they find that the example of the Belgian concessionaires
+in their treatment of the natives is being imitated by even one of
+the American Congo Company the people of this country will know it,
+and may the Lord have mercy on his soul!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+HUNTING THE HIPPO
+
+
+Except once or twice in the Zoo, I never had seen a hippopotamus,
+and I was most anxious, before I left the Congo, to meet one. I
+wanted to look at him when he was free, and his own master, without
+iron bars or keepers; when he believed he was quite alone, and was
+enjoying his bath in peace and confidence. I also wanted to shoot
+him, and to hang in my ancestral halls his enormous head with the
+great jaws open and the inside of them painted pink and the small
+tusks hungrily protruding. I had this desire, in spite of the fact
+that for every hippo except the particular one whose head I coveted,
+I entertained the utmost good feeling.
+
+As a lad, among other beasts the hippopotamus had appealed to my
+imagination. Collectively, I had always looked upon them as most
+charming people. They come of an ancient family. Two thousand four
+hundred years ago they were mentioned by Herodotus. And Herodotus to
+the animal kingdom is what Domesday Book is to the landed gentry. To
+exist beautifully for twenty-four hundred years without a single
+mesalliance, without having once stooped to trade, is certainly a
+strong title to nobility. Other animals by contact with man have
+become degraded. The lion, the "King of Beasts," now rides a
+bicycle, and growls, as previously rehearsed, at the young woman in
+spangles, of whom he is secretly afraid. And the elephant, the
+monarch of the jungle, and of a family as ancient and noble as that
+of the hippopotamus, the monarch of the river, has become a beast of
+burden and works for his living. You can see him in Phoenix Park
+dragging a road-roller, in Siam and India carrying logs, and at
+Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn. The
+royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.
+
+But, you never see a hippopotamus chained to a road-roller, or
+riding a bicycle. He is still the gentleman, the man of elegant
+leisure, the aristocrat of aristocrats, harming no one, and, in his
+ancestral river, living the simple life.
+
+And yet, I sought to kill him. At least, one of him, but only one.
+And, that I did not kill even one, while a bitter disappointment, is
+still a source of satisfaction.
+
+In the Congo River we saw only two hippos, and both of them were
+dead. They had been shot from a steamer. If the hippo is killed in
+the water, it is impossible to recover the body at once. It sinks
+and does not rise, some say, for an hour, others say for seven
+hours. As in an hour the current may have carried the body four
+miles below where it sank, the steamer does not wait, and the
+destruction of the big beast is simple murder. There should be a law
+in the Congo to prevent their destruction, and, no doubt, if the
+State thought it could make a few francs out of protecting the
+hippo, as it makes many million francs by preserving the elephant,
+which it does for the ivory, such a law would exist. We soon saw
+many hippos, but although we could not persuade the only other
+passenger not to fire at them, there are a few hippos still alive in
+the Congo. For, the only time the Captain and I were positive he
+hit anything, was when he fired over our heads and blew off the roof
+of the bridge.
+
+When first we saw the two dead hippos, one of them was turning and
+twisting so violently that we thought he was alive. But, as we drew
+near, we saw the strange convulsions were due to two enormous and
+ugly crocodiles, who were fiercely pulling at the body. Crocodiles
+being man-eaters, we had no feelings about shooting them, either in
+the water or up a tree; and I hope we hit them. In any event, after
+we fired the body drifted on in peace.
+
+On my return trip, going with the stream, when the boat covers about
+four times the distance she makes when steaming against it, I saw
+many hippos. In one day I counted sixty-nine. But on our way up the
+Congo, until we turned into the Kasai River, we saw none.
+
+So, on the first night we camped in the Kasai I had begun to think I
+never would see one, and I went ashore both skeptical and
+discouraged. We had stopped, not at a wood post, but at a place on
+the river's bank previously untouched by man, where there was a
+stretch of beach, and then a higher level with trees and tall
+grasses. Driven deep in this beach were the footprints of a large
+elephant. They looked as though some one had amused himself by
+sinking a bucket in the mud, and then pulling it out. For sixty
+yards I followed the holes and finally lost them in a confusion of
+other tracks. The place had been so trampled upon that it was beaten
+into a basin. It looked as though every animal in the Kasai had met
+there to hold a dance. There were the deep imprints of the hippos
+and the round foot of the elephant, with the marks of the big toes
+showing as clearly as though they had been scooped out of the mud
+with a trowel, the hoofs of buffalo as large as the shoe of a cart
+horse, and the arrow-like marks of the antelope, some in dainty
+little Vs, others measuring three inches across, and three inches
+from the base to the point. They came from every direction, down the
+bank and out of the river; and crossed and recrossed, and beneath
+the fresh prints that had been made that morning at sunrise, were
+those of days before rising up sharply out of the sun-dried clay,
+like bas-reliefs in stucco. I had gone ashore in a state of mind so
+skeptical that I was as surprised as Crusoe at the sight of
+footprints. It was as though the boy who did not believe in fairies
+suddenly stumbled upon them sliding down the moonbeams. One felt
+distinctly apologetic--as though uninvited he had pushed himself
+into a family gathering. At the same time there was the excitement
+of meeting in their own homes the strange peoples I had seen only in
+the springtime, when the circus comes to New York, in the basement
+of Madison Square Garden, where they are our pitiful prisoners,
+bruising their shoulders against bars. Here they were monarchs of
+all they surveyed. I was the intruder; and, looking down at the
+marks of the great paws and delicate hoofs, I felt as much out of
+place as would a grizzly bear in a Fifth Avenue club. And I behaved
+much as would the grizzly bear. I rushed back for my rifle intent on
+killing something.
+
+The sun had just set; the moon was shining faintly: it was the
+moment the beasts of the jungle came to the river to drink. Anfossi,
+although he had spent three years in the Congo and had three years'
+contract still to work out, was as determined to kill something as
+was the tenderfoot from New York.
+
+Sixty yards from the stern of the _Deliverance_ was the basin I had
+discovered; at an equal distance from her bow, a stream plunged into
+the river. Anfossi argued the hippos would prefer to drink the clear
+water of the stream, to the muddy water of the basin, and elected to
+watch at the stream. I carried a deck chair to the edge of my basin
+and placed it in the shadow of the trees. Anfossi went into our
+cabin for his rifle. At that exact moment a hippopotamus climbed
+leisurely out of the river and plunged into the stream. One of the
+soldiers on shore saw him and rushed for the boat. Anfossi sent my
+boy on the jump for me and, like a gentleman, waited until I had
+raced the sixty yards. But when we reached the stream there was
+nothing visible but the trampled grass and great holes in the mud
+and near us in the misty moonlight river something that puffed and
+blew slowly and luxuriously, as would any fat gentleman who had been
+forced to run for it. Had I followed Anfossi's judgment and gone
+along the bank sixty yards ahead, instead of sixty yards astern of
+the _Deliverance_, at the exact moment at which I sank into my deck
+chair, the hippo would have emerged at my feet. It is even betting
+as to which of us would have been the more scared.
+
+The next day, and for days after, we saw nothing but hippos. We saw
+them floating singly and in family groups, with generally four or
+five cows to one bull, and sometimes in front a baby hippo no larger
+than a calf, which the mother with her great bulk would push against
+the swift current, as you see a tugboat in the lee of a great liner.
+Once, what I thought was a spit of rocks suddenly tumbled apart and
+became twenty hippos, piled more or less on top of each other.
+During that one day, as they floated with the current, enjoying
+their afternoon's nap, we saw thirty-four. They impressed me as the
+most idle, and, therefore, the most aristocratic of animals. They
+toil not, neither do they spin; they had nothing to do but float in
+the warm water and the bright sunshine; their only effort was to
+open their enormous jaws and yawn luxuriously, in the pure content
+of living, in absolute boredom. They reminded you only of fat gouty
+old gentlemen, puffing and blowing in the pool at the Warm Springs.
+
+The next chance we had at one of them on shore came on our first
+evening in the Kasai just before sunset. Captain Jensen was steering
+for a flat island of sand and grass where he meant to tie up for the
+night. About fifty yards from the spot for which we were making, was
+the only tree on the island, and under it with his back to us, and
+leisurely eating the leaves of the lower branches, exactly as though
+he were waiting for us by appointment, was a big gray hippo. His
+back being toward us, we could not aim at his head, and he could not
+see us. But the _Deliverance_ is not noiseless, and, hearing the
+paddle-wheel, the hippo turned, saw us, and bolted for the river.
+The hippopotamus is as much at home in the water as the seal. To get
+to the water, if he is surprised out of it, and to get under it, if
+he is alarmed while in it, is instinct. If he does venture ashore,
+he goes only a few rods from the bank and then only to forage. His
+home is the river, and he rushes to bury himself in it as naturally
+as the squirrel makes for a tree. This particular hippo ran for the
+river as fast as a horse coming at a slow trot. He was a very badly
+scared hippo. His head was high in the air, his fat sides were
+shaking, and the one little eye turned toward us was filled with
+concern. Behind him the yellow sun was setting into the lagoons. On
+the flat stretch of sand he was the only object, and against the
+horizon loomed as large as a freight car. That must be why we both
+missed him. I tried to explain that the reason I missed him was
+that, never before having seen so large an animal running for his
+life, I could not watch him do it and look at the gun sights. No one
+believed that was why I missed him. I did not believe it myself. In
+any event neither of us hit his head, and he plunged down the bank
+to freedom, carrying most of the bank with him. But, while we still
+were violently blaming each other, at about two hundred yards below
+the boat, he again waddled out of the river and waded knee deep up
+the little stream. Keeping the bunches of grass between us, I ran up
+the beach, aimed at his eye and this time hit him fairly enough.
+With a snort he rose high in the air, and so, for an instant,
+balanced his enormous bulk. The action was like that of a horse
+that rears on his hind legs, when he is whipped over the nose. And
+apparently my bullet hurt him no more than the whip the horse, for
+he dropped heavily to all fours, and again disappeared into the
+muddy river. Our disappointment and chagrin were intense, and at
+once Anfossi and I organized a hunt for that evening. To encourage
+us, while we were sitting on the bridge making a hasty dinner,
+another hippopotamus had the impertinence to rise, blowing like a
+whale, not ten feet from where we sat. We could have thrown our tin
+cups and hit him; but he was in the water, and now we were seeking
+only those on land.
+
+ [Illustration: Mr. Davis and Native "Boy," on the Kasai River.]
+
+Two years ago when the atrocities along the Kasai made the natives
+fear the white man and the white man fear the natives, each of the
+river boats was furnished with a stand of Albini rifles. Three of
+the black soldiers, who were keen sportsmen, were served with these
+muskets, and as soon as the moon rose, the soldiers and Anfossi, my
+black boy, with an extra gun, and I set forth to clear the island of
+hippos. To the stranger it was a most curious hunt. The island was
+perfectly flat and bare, and the river had eaten into it and
+overflowed it with tiny rivulets and deep, swift-running streams.
+Into these rivulets and streams the soldiers plunged, one in front,
+feeling the depth of the water with a sounding rod, and as he led we
+followed. The black men made a splendid picture. They were naked but
+for breech-cloths, and the moonlight flashed on their wet skins and
+upon the polished barrels of the muskets. But, as a sporting
+proposition, as far as I could see, we had taken on the hippopotamus
+at his own game. We were supposed to be on an island, but the water
+was up to our belts and running at five miles an hour. I could not
+understand why we had not openly and aboveboard walked into the
+river. Wading waist high in the water with a salmon rod I could
+understand, but not swimming around in a river with a gun. The force
+of the shallowest stream was the force of the great river behind it,
+and wherever you put your foot, the current, on its race to the sea,
+annoyed at the impediment, washed the sand from under the sole of
+your foot and tugged at your knees and ankles. To add to the
+interest the three soldiers held their muskets at full cock, and as
+they staggered for a footing each pointed his gun at me. There also
+was a strange fish about the size of an English sole that sprang out
+of the water and hurled himself through space. Each had a white
+belly, and as they skimmed past us in the moonlight it was as though
+some one was throwing dinner plates. After we had swum the length of
+the English Channel, we returned to the boat. As to that midnight
+hunt I am still uncertain as to whether we were hunting the hippos
+or the hippos were hunting us.
+
+The next morning we had our third and last chance at a hippo.
+
+It is distinctly a hard-luck story. We had just gone on the bridge
+for breakfast when we saw him walking slowly from us along an island
+of white sand as flat as your hand, and on which he loomed large as
+a haystack. Captain Jensen was a true sportsman. He jerked the bell
+to the engine-room, and at full speed the _Deliverance_ raced for
+the shore. The hippo heard us, and, like a baseball player caught
+off base, tried to get back to the river. Captain Jensen danced on
+the deck plates:
+
+"Schoot it! schoot it!" he yelled, "Gotfurdamn! schoot it!" When
+Anfossi and I fired, the _Deliverance_ was a hundred yards from the
+hippo, and the hippo was not five feet from the bank. In another
+instant, he would have been over it and safe. But when we fired, he
+went down as suddenly as though a safe had dropped on him. Except
+that he raised his head, and rolled it from side to side, he
+remained perfectly still. From his actions, or lack of actions, it
+looked as though one of the bullets had broken his back; and when
+the blacks saw he could not move they leaped and danced and
+shrieked. To them the death of the big beast promised much chop.
+
+But Captain Jensen was not so confident. "Schoot it," he continued
+to shout, "we lose him yet! Gotfurdamn! schoot it!"
+
+My gun was an American magazine rifle, holding five cartridges. We
+now were very near the hippo, and I shot him in the head twice, and,
+once, when he opened them, in the jaws. At each shot his head would
+jerk with a quick toss of pain, and at the sight the blacks screamed
+with delight that was primitively savage. After the last shot, when
+Captain Jensen had brought the _Deliverance_ broadside to the bank,
+the hippo ceased to move. The boat had not reached the shore before
+the boys with the steel hawser were in the water; the gangplank was
+run out, and the black soldiers and wood boys, with their knives,
+were dancing about the hippo and hacking at his tail. Their idea was
+to make him the more quickly bleed to death. I ran to the cabin for
+more cartridges. It seemed an absurd precaution. I was as sure I had
+the head of that hippo as I was sure that my own was still on my
+neck. My only difficulty was whether to hang the head in the front
+hall or in the dining-room. It might be rather too large for the
+dining-room. That was all that troubled me. After three minutes,
+when I was back on deck, the hippo still lay immovable. Certainly
+twenty men were standing about him; three were sawing off his tail,
+and the women were chanting triumphantly a song they used to sing in
+the days when the men were allowed to hunt, and had returned
+successful with food.
+
+On the bridge was Anfossi with his camera. Before the men had
+surrounded the hippo he had had time to snap one picture of it. I
+had just started after my camera, when from the blacks there was a
+yell of alarm, of rage, and amazement. The hippo had opened his
+eyes and raised his head. I shoved the boys out of the way, and,
+putting the gun close to his head, fired pointblank. I wanted to put
+him out of pain. I need not have distressed myself. The bullet
+affected him no more than a quinine pill. What seemed chiefly to
+concern him, what apparently had brought him back to life, was the
+hacking at his tail. That was an indignity he could not brook.
+
+His expression, and he had a perfectly human expression, was one of
+extreme annoyance and of some slight alarm, as though he were
+muttering: "This is no place for _me_," and, without more ado, he
+began to roll toward the river. Without killing some one, I could
+not again use the rifle. The boys were close upon him, prying him
+back with the gangplank, beating him with sticks of firewood, trying
+to rope him with the steel hawser. On the bridge Captain Jensen and
+Anfossi were giving orders in Danish and Italian, and on the bank I
+swore in American. Everybody shoved and pushed and beat at the great
+bulk, and the great bulk rolled steadily on. We might as well have
+tried to budge the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He reached the bank, he
+crushed it beneath him, and, like a suspension bridge, splashed into
+the water. Even then, we who watched him thought he would stick fast
+between the boat and the bank, that the hawser would hold him. But
+he sank like a submarine, and we stood gaping at the muddy water and
+saw him no more. When I recovered from my first rage I was glad he
+was still alive to float in the sun and puff and blow and open his
+great jaws in a luxurious yawn. I could imagine his joining his
+friends after his meeting with us, and remarking in reference to our
+bullets: "I find the mosquitoes are quite bad this morning."
+
+With this chapter is published the photograph Anfossi took, from the
+deck of the steamer, of our hippo--the hippo that was too stupid to
+know when he was dead. It is not a good photograph, but of our hippo
+it is all we have to show. I am still undecided whether to hang it
+in the hall or the dining-room.
+
+ [Illustration: The Hippopotamus that Did Not Know He Was Dead.]
+
+The days I spent on my trip up the river were of delightful
+sameness, sunshine by day, with the great panorama drifting past,
+and quiet nights of moonlight. For diversion, there were many
+hippos, crocodiles, and monkeys, and, though we saw only their
+tracks and heard them only in the jungle, great elephants. And
+innumerable strange birds--egrets, eagles, gray parrots, crimson
+cranes, and giant flamingoes--as tall as a man and from tip to tip
+measuring eight feet.
+
+Each day the programme was the same. The arrival at the wood post,
+where we were given only excuses and no wood, and where once or
+twice we unloaded blue cloth and bags of salt, which is the currency
+of the Upper Congo, and the halt for hours to cut wood in the
+forest.
+
+Once we stopped at a mission and noted the contrast it made with the
+bare, unkempt posts of the State. It was the Catholic mission at
+Wombali, and it was a beauty spot of flowers, thatched houses,
+grass, and vegetables. There was a brickyard, and schools, and
+sewing-machines, and the blacks, instead of scowling at us, nodded
+and smiled and looked happy and contented. The Father was a great
+red-bearded giant, who seemed to have still stored up in him all the
+energy of the North. While the steamer was unloaded he raced me
+over the vegetable garden and showed me his farm. I had seen other
+of the Catholic Missions, and I spoke of how well they looked, of
+the signs they gave of hard work, and of consideration for the
+blacks.
+
+"I am not of that Order," the Father said gravely. He was speaking
+in English, and added, as though he expected some one to resent it:
+"We are Jesuits." No one resented it, and he added: "We have our
+Order in your country. Do you know Fordham College?"
+
+Did I know it? If you are trying to find our farm, the automobile
+book tells you to leave Fordham College on your left after Jerome
+Avenue.
+
+"Of course, I know it," I said. "They have one of the best baseball
+nines near New York; they play the Giants every spring."
+
+The Reverend Father started.
+
+"They play with Giants!" he gasped.
+
+I did not know how to say "baseball nines" in French, but at least
+he was assured that whatever it was, it was one of the best near New
+York.
+
+Then Captain Jensen's little black boy ran up to tell me the
+steamer was waiting, and began in Bangalese to beg something of the
+Father. The priest smiled and left us, returning with a rosary and
+crucifix, which the boy hung round his neck, and then knelt, and the
+red-bearded Father laid his fingers on the boy's kinky head. He was
+a very happy boy over his new possession, and it was much coveted by
+all the others. One of the black mammies, to ward off evil from the
+little naked baby at her breast, offered an arm's length of blue
+cloth for "the White Man's fetish."
+
+ [Illustration: The Jesuit Brothers at the Wombali Mission.]
+
+My voyage up the Kasai ended at Dima, the headquarters of the Kasai
+Concession. I had been told that at Dima I would find a rubber
+plantation, and I had gone there to see it. I found that the
+plantation was four days distant, and that the boat for the
+plantation did not start for six days. I also had been told by the
+English missionaries at Dima, that I would find an American mission.
+When I reached Dima I learned that the American mission was at a
+station further up the river, which could not be reached sooner than
+a month. That is the sort of information upon which in the Congo
+one is forced to regulate his movements. As there was at Dima
+neither mission nor plantation, and as the only boat that would
+leave it in ten days was departing the next morning, I remained
+there only one night. It was a place cut out of the jungle, two
+hundred yards square, and of all stations I saw in the Congo, the
+best managed. It is the repair shop for the steamers belonging to
+the Kasai Concession, as well as the headquarters of the company and
+the residence of the director, M. Dryepoint. He and Van Damme seemed
+to be the most popular officials in the Congo. M. Dryepoint was up
+the river, so I did not meet him, but I was most courteously and
+hospitably entertained by M. Fumiere. He gave me a whole house to
+myself, and personally showed me over his small kingdom. All the
+houses were of brick, and the paths and roads were covered with
+gravel and lined with flowers. Nothing in the Congo is more curious
+than this pretty town of suburban villas and orderly machine shops;
+with the muddy river for a street and the impenetrable jungle for a
+back yard. The home of the director at Dima is the proud boast of
+the entire Congo. And all they say of it is true. It did have a
+billiard table and ice, and a piano, and M. Fumiere invited me to
+join his friends at an excellent dinner. In furnishing this
+celebrated house, the idea had apparently been to place in it the
+things one would least expect to find in the jungle, or, without
+wishing to be ungracious, anywhere. So, although there are no women
+at Dima, there are great mirrors in brass frames, chandeliers of
+glass with festoons and pendants of glass, metal lamps with shades
+of every color, painted plaster statuettes and carved silk-covered
+chairs. In the red glow of the lamps, surrounded by these Belgian
+atrocities, M. Fumiere sat down to the pianola. The heat of Africa
+filled the room; on one side we could have touched the jungle, on
+the other in the river the hippopotamus puffed and snorted. M.
+Fumiere pulled out the stops, and upon the heat and silence of the
+night, floated the "Evening Star," Mascagni's "Intermezzo," and
+"Chin-chin Chinaman."
+
+Next morning I left for Leopoldville in a boat much larger than the
+_Deliverance_, but with none of her cheer or good-fellowship. This
+boat was run by the black wife of the captain. Trailing her velvet
+gown, and cleaning her teeth with a stick of wood, she penetrated to
+every part of the steamer, making discipline impossible and driving
+the crew out of control.
+
+I was glad to escape at Kinchassa to the clean and homelike bungalow
+and beautiful gardens of the only Englishman still in the employ of
+the State, Mr. Cuthbert Malet, who gave me hospitably of his scanty
+store of "Scotch," and, what was even more of a sacrifice, of his
+precious handful of eggs. A week later I was again in Boma, waiting
+for the _Nigeria_ to take me back to Liverpool.
+
+Before returning to the West Coast and leaving the subject of the
+Congo, I wish to testify to what seemed to me the enormously
+important work that is being done by the missionaries. I am not
+always an admirer of the missionary. Some of those one meets in
+China and Japan seem to be taking much more interest in their own
+bodies than in the souls of others. But, in the Congo, almost the
+only people who are working in behalf of the natives are those
+attached to the missions. Because they bear witness against Leopold,
+much is said by his hired men and press agents against them. But
+they are deserving of great praise. Some of them are narrow and
+bigoted, and one could wish they were much more tolerant of their
+white brothers in exile, but compared with the good they do, these
+faults count for nothing. It is due to them that Europe and the
+United States know the truth about the Congo. They were the first to
+bear witness, and the hazardous work they still are doing for their
+fellow men is honest, practical Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+OLD CALABAR
+
+
+While I was up the Congo and the Kasai rivers, Mrs. Davis had
+remained at Boma, and when I rejoined her, we booked passage home on
+the _Nigeria_. We chose the _Nigeria_, which is an Elder-Dempster
+freight and passenger steamer, in preference to the fast mail
+steamer because of the ports of the West Coast we wished to see as
+many as possible. And, on her six weeks' voyage to Liverpool, the
+_Nigeria_ promised to spend as much time at anchor as at sea. On the
+Coast it is a more serious matter to reserve a cabin than in New
+York. You do not stop at an uptown office, and on a diagram of the
+ship's insides, as though you were playing roulette, point at a
+number. Instead, as you are to occupy your cabin, not for one, but
+for six, weeks, you search, as vigilantly as a navy officer looking
+for contraband, the ship herself and each cabin.
+
+But going aboard was a simple ceremony. The Hotel Splendide stands
+on the bank of the Congo River. After saying "Good-by" to her
+proprietor, I walked to the edge of the water and waved my helmet.
+In the Congo, a white man standing in the sun without a hat is a
+spectacle sufficiently thrilling to excite the attention of all, and
+at once Captain Hughes of the _Nigeria_ sent a cargo boat to the
+rescue, and on the shoulders of naked Kroo boys Mrs. Davis and the
+maid, and the trunks, spears, tents, bathtubs, carved idols, native
+mats, and a live mongoos were dropped into it, and we were paddled
+to the gangway.
+
+"If that's all, we might as well get under way," said Captain
+Hughes. The anchor chains creaked, from the bank the proprietor of
+the Splendide waved his hand, and the long voyage to Liverpool had
+begun. It was as casual as halting and starting a cable-car.
+
+According to schedule, after leaving the Congo, we should have gone
+south and touched at Loanda. But on this voyage, outward bound, the
+_Nigeria_ had carried, to help build the railroad at Lobito Bay, a
+deckload of camels. They had proved trying passengers, and instead
+of first touching at the Congo, Captain Hughes had continued on
+south and put them ashore. So we were robbed of seeing both Loanda
+and the camels.
+
+This line, until Calabar is reached, carries but few passengers,
+and, except to receive cargo, the ship is not fully in commission.
+During this first week she is painted, and holystoned, her carpets
+are beaten, her cabins scrubbed and aired, and the passengers mess
+with the officers. So, of the ship's life, we acquired an intimate
+knowledge, her interests became our own, and the necessity of
+feeding her gaping holds with cargo was personal and acute. On a
+transatlantic steamer, when once the hatches are down, the captain
+need think only of navigation; on these coasters, the hatches never
+are down, and the captain, that sort of captain dear to the heart of
+the owners, is the man who fills the holds.
+
+A skipper going ashore to drum up trade was a novel spectacle.
+Imagine the captain of one of the Atlantic greyhounds prying among
+the warehouses on West Street, demanding of the merchants:
+"Anything going my way, this trip?" He would scorn to do it. Before
+his passengers have passed the custom officers, he is in mufti, and
+on his way to his villa on Brooklyn Heights, or to the Lambs Club,
+and until the Blue Peter is again at the fore, little he cares for
+passengers, mails, or cargo. But the captain of a "coaster" must be
+sailor and trader, too. He is expected to navigate a coast, the
+latest chart of which is dated somewhere near 1830, and at which the
+waves rush in walls of spray, sometimes as high as a three-story
+house. He must speak all the known languages of Europe, and all the
+unknown tongues of innumerable black brothers. At each port he must
+entertain out of his own pocket the agents of all the trading
+houses, and, in his head, he must keep the market price, "when laid
+down in Liverpool," of mahogany, copra, copal, rubber, palm oil, and
+ivory. To see that the agent has not overlooked a few bags of ground
+nuts, or a dozen puncheons of oil, he must go on shore and peer into
+the compound of each factory, and on board he must keep peace
+between the Kroo boys and the black deck passengers, and see that
+the white passengers with a temperature of 105, do not drink more
+than is good for them. At least, those are a few of the duties the
+captains on the ships controlled by Sir Alfred Jones, who is Elder
+and Dempster, are expected to perform. No wonder Sir Alfred is
+popular.
+
+Our first port of call was Landana, in Portuguese territory, but two
+ships of the Woermann Line were there ahead of us and had gobbled up
+all the freight. So we could but up anchor and proceed to
+Libreville, formerly the capital of the French Congo. At five in the
+morning by the light of a ship's lantern, we were paddled ashore to
+drum up trade. We found two traders, Ives and Thomas, who had
+waiting for the _Nigeria_ at the mouth of the Gabun River six
+hundred logs of mahogany, and, in consequence, there was general
+rejoicing, and Scotch and "sparklets," and even music from a German
+music-box that would burst into song only after it had been fed with
+a copper. One of the clerks said that Ives had forgotten how to
+extract the coppers and in consequence was using the music-box as a
+savings bank.
+
+In the French Congo the natives are permitted to trade; in the
+Congo Free State they are not, or, rather, they have nothing with
+which to trade, and the contrast between the empty "factories" of
+the Congo and those of Libreville, crowded with natives buying and
+selling, was remarkable. There also was a conspicuous difference in
+the quality and variety of the goods. In Leopold's Congo "trade"
+goods is a term of contempt. It describes articles manufactured only
+for those who have no choice and must accept whatever is offered.
+When your customers must take what you please to give them the
+quality of your goods is likely to deteriorate. Salt of the poorest
+grade, gaudy fabrics that neither "wear" nor "wash," bars of coarse
+soap (the native is continually washing his single strip of cloth),
+and axe-heads made of iron, are what Leopold thinks are a fair
+exchange for the forced labor of the black.
+
+But the articles I found in the factories in Libreville were what,
+in the Congo, are called "white man's goods" and were of excellent
+quality and in great variety. There were even French novels and
+cigars. Some of the latter, called the Young American on account of
+the name and the flag on the lid, tempted me, until I saw they were
+manufactured by Dusseldorffer and Vanderswassen, and one suspected
+Rotterdam.
+
+In Ives's factory I saw for the first time a "trade" rifle, or Tower
+musket. In the vernacular of the Coast, they are "gas-pipe" guns.
+They are put together in England, and to a white man are a most
+terrifying weapon. The original Tower muskets, such as, in the days
+of '76, were hung over the fireplace of the forefathers of the Sons
+of the Revolution, were manufactured in England, and stamped with
+the word "Tower," and for the reigning king G.R. I suppose at that
+date at the Tower of London there was an arsenal; but I am ready to
+be corrected. To-day the guns are manufactured at Birmingham, but
+they still have the flint lock, and still are stamped with the word
+"Tower" and the royal crown over the letters G.R., and with the
+arrow which is supposed to mark the property of the government. The
+barrel is three feet four inches long, and the bore is that of an
+artesian well. The native fills four inches of this cavity with
+powder and the remaining three feet with rusty nails, barbed wire,
+leaden slugs, and the legs and broken parts of iron pots. An officer
+of the W.A.F.F.'s, in a fight in the bush in South Nigeria, had one
+of these things fired at him from a distance of fifteen feet. He
+told me all that saved him was that when the native pulled the
+trigger the recoil of the gun "kicked" the muzzle two feet in the
+air and the native ten feet into the bush. I bought a Tower rifle at
+the trade price, a pound, and brought it home. But although my
+friends have offered to back either end of the gun as being the more
+destructive, we have found no one with a sufficient sporting spirit
+to determine the point.
+
+Libreville is a very pretty town, but when it was laid out the
+surveyors just missed placing the Equator in its main street. It is
+easy to understand why with such a live wire in the vicinity
+Libreville is warm. From the same cause it also is rich in flowers,
+vines, and trees growing in generous, undisciplined abundance,
+making of Libreville one vast botanical garden, and burying the town
+and its bungalows under screens of green and branches of scarlet
+and purple flowers. Close to the surf runs an avenue bordered by
+giant cocoanut palms and, after the sun is down, this is the
+fashionable promenade. Here every evening may be seen in their
+freshest linen the six married white men of Libreville, and, in the
+latest Paris frocks, the six married ladies, while from the verandas
+of the factories that line the sea front and from under the paper
+lanterns of the Cafe Guion the clerks and traders sip their absinthe
+and play dominoes, and cast envious glances at the six fortunate
+fellow exiles.
+
+For several days we lay a few miles south of Libreville, off the
+mouth of the Gabun River, taking in the logs of mahogany. It was a
+continuous performance of the greatest interest. I still do not
+understand why all those engaged in it were not drowned, or pounded
+to a pulp. Just before we touched at the Gabun River, two tramp
+steamers, chartered by Americans, carried off a full cargo of this
+mahogany to the States. It was an experiment the result of which the
+traders of Libreville are awaiting with interest. The mahogany that
+the reader sees in America probably comes from Hayti, Cuba, or
+Belize, and is of much finer quality than that of the Gabun River,
+which latter is used for making what the trade calls "fancy"
+cigar-boxes and cheap furniture. But before it becomes a cigar-box
+it passes through many adventures. Weeks before the steamer arrives
+the trader, followed by his black boys, explores the jungle and
+blazes the trees. Then the boys cut trails through the forest, and,
+using logs for rollers, drag and push the tree trunks to the bank of
+the river. There the tree is cut into huge cubes, weighing about a
+ton, and measuring twelve to fifteen feet in length and three feet
+across each face. A boy can "shape" one of these logs in a day.
+
+Although his pay varies according to whether the tributaries of the
+river are full or low, so making the moving of the logs easy or
+difficult, he can earn about three pounds ten shillings a month,
+paid in cash. Compared with the eighty cents a month paid only a few
+miles away in the Congo Free State, and in "trade" goods, these are
+good wages. When the log is shaped the mark of the trader is branded
+on it with an iron, just as we brand cattle, and it is turned loose
+on the river. At the mouth of the river there is little danger of
+the log escaping, for the waves are stronger than the tide, and
+drive the logs upon the shore. There, in the surf, we found these
+tons of mahogany pounding against each other. In the ship's
+steam-launch were iron chains, a hundred yards long, to which, at
+intervals, were fastened "dogs," or spikes. These spikes were driven
+into the end of a log, the brand upon the log was noted by the
+captain and trader, and the logs, chained together like the vertebrae
+of a great sea serpent, were towed to the ship's side. There they
+were made fast, and three Kroo boys knocked the spike out of each
+log, warped a chain around it, and made fast that chain to the steel
+hawser of the winch. As it was drawn to the deck a Senegalese
+soldier, acting for the Customs, gave it a second blow with a
+branding hammer, and, thundering and smashing, it swung into the
+hold.
+
+ [Illustration: There, in the Surf, We Found These Tons of Mahogany,
+ Pounding Against Each Other.]
+
+In the "round up" of the logs the star performers were the three
+Kroo boys at the ship's side. For days, in fascinated horror, the
+six passengers watched them, prayed for them, and made bets as to
+which would be the first to die. One understands that a Kroo boy is
+as much at home in the sea as on shore, but these boys were neither
+in the sea nor on shore. They were balancing themselves on blocks of
+slippery wood that weighed a ton, but which were hurled about by the
+great waves as though they were life-belts. All night the hammering
+of the logs made the ship echo like a monster drum, and all day
+without an instant's pause each log reared and pitched, spun like a
+barrel, dived like a porpoise, or, broadside, battered itself
+against the iron plates. But, no matter what tricks it played, a
+Kroo boy rode it as easily as though it were a horse in a
+merry-go-round.
+
+It was a wonderful exhibition. It furnished all the thrills that one
+gets when watching a cowboy on a bucking bronco, or a trained seal.
+Again and again a log, in wicked conspiracy with another log, would
+plan to entice a Kroo boy between them, and smash him. At the sight
+the passengers would shriek a warning, the boy would dive between
+the logs, and a mass of twelve hundred pounds of mahogany would
+crash against a mass weighing fifteen hundred with a report like
+colliding freight cars.
+
+And then, as, breathless, we waited to see what once was a Kroo boy
+float to the surface, he would appear sputtering and grinning, and
+saying to us as clearly as a Kroo smile can say it: "He never
+touched me!"
+
+ [Illustration: A Log of Mahogany Jammed in the Anchor Chains.]
+
+Two days after we had stored away the mahogany we anchored off
+Duala, the capital of the German Cameroons. Duala is built upon a
+high cliff, and from the water the white and yellow buildings with
+many pillars gave it the appearance of a city. Instead, it is a
+clean, pretty town. With the German habit of order, it has been laid
+out like barracks, but with many gardens, well-kept, shaded streets,
+and high, cool houses, scientifically planned to meet the
+necessities of the tropics. At Duala the white traders and officials
+were plump and cheerful looking, and in the air there was more of
+prosperity than fever. The black and white sentry boxes and the
+native soldiers practising the stork march of the Kaiser's army were
+signs of a rigid military rule, but the signs of Germany's efforts
+in trade were more conspicuous. Nowhere on the coast did we see as
+at Duala such gorgeous offices as those of the great trading house
+of Woermann, the hated rivals of "Sir Alfred," such carved
+furniture, such shining brass railings, and nowhere else did we see
+plate-glass windows, in which, with unceasing wonder, the natives
+stared at reflections of their own persons. In the river there was a
+private dry dock of the Woermanns, and along the wharfs for acres
+was lumber for the Woermanns, boxes of trade goods, puncheons and
+casks for the Woermanns, private cooper shops and private machine
+shops and private banks for the Woermanns. The house flag of the
+Woermanns became as significant as that of a reigning sovereign. One
+felt inclined to salute it.
+
+The success of the German merchant on the East Coast and over all
+the world appears to be a question of character. He is patient,
+methodical, painstaking; it is his habit of industry that is helping
+him to close port after port to English, French, and American goods.
+The German clerks do not go to the East Coast or to China and South
+America to drink absinthe or whiskey, or to play dominoes or
+cricket. They work twice as long as do the other white men, and
+during those longer office hours they toil twice as hard. One of our
+passengers was a German agent returning for his vacation. I used to
+work in the smoking-room and he always was at the next table, also
+at work, on his ledgers and account books. He was so industrious
+that he bored me, and one day I asked him why, instead of spoiling
+his vacation with work, he had not balanced his books before he left
+the Coast.
+
+"It is an error," he said; "I can not find him." And he explained
+that in the record of his three years' stewardship, which he was to
+turn over to the directors in Berlin, there was somewhere a mistake
+of a sixpence.
+
+"But," I protested, "what's sixpence to you? You drink champagne all
+day. You begin at nine in the morning!"
+
+"I drink champagne," said the clerk, "because for three years I have
+myself alone in the bush lived, but, can I to my directors go with a
+book not balanced?" He laid his hand upon his heart and shook his
+head. "It is my heart that tells me 'No!'"
+
+After three weeks he gave a shout, his face blushed with pleasure,
+and actual tears were in his eyes. He had dug out the error, and at
+once he celebrated the recovery of the single sixpence by giving me
+twenty-four shillings' worth of champagne. It is a true story, and
+illustrates, I think, the training and method of the German mind, of
+the industry of the merchants who are trading over all the seas. As
+a rule the "trade" goods "made in Germany" are "shoddy." They do not
+compare in quality with those of England or the States; in every
+foreign port you will find that the English linen is the best, that
+the American agricultural implements, American hardware, saws, axes,
+machetes, are superior to those manufactured in any other country.
+But the German, though his goods are poorer, cuts the coat to please
+the customer. He studies the wishes of the man who is to pay. He is
+not the one who says: "Take it, or leave it."
+
+The agent of one of the largest English firms on the Ivory Coast,
+one that started by trading in slaves, said to me: "Our largest
+shipment to this coast is gin. This is a French colony, and if the
+French traders and I were patriots instead of merchants we would
+buy from our own people, but we buy from the Germans, because trade
+follows no flag. They make a gin out of potatoes colored with rum or
+gin, and label it 'Demerara' and 'Jamaica.' They sell it to us on
+the wharf at Antwerp for ninepence a gallon, and we sell it at nine
+francs per dozen bottles. Germany is taking our trade from us
+because she undersells us, and because her merchants don't wait for
+trade to come to them, but go after it. Before the Woermann boat is
+due their agent here will come to my factory and spy out all I have
+in my compound. 'Why don't you ship those logs with us?' he'll ask.
+
+"'Can't spare the boys to carry them to the beach,' I'll say.
+
+"'I'll furnish the boys,' he'll answer. That's the German way.
+
+"The Elder-Dempster boats lie three miles out at sea and blow a
+whistle at us. They act as though by carrying our freight they were
+doing us a favor. These German ships, to save you the long pull,
+anchor close to the beach and lend you their own shore boats and
+their own boys to work your cargo. And if you give them a few tons
+to carry, like as not they'll 'dash' you to a case of 'fizz.' And
+meanwhile the English captain is lying outside the bar tooting his
+whistle and wanting to know if you think he's going to run his ship
+aground for a few bags of rotten kernels. And he can't see, and the
+people at home can't see, why the Germans are crowding us off the
+Coast."
+
+Just outside of Duala, in the native village of Bell Town, is the
+palace and the harem of the ruler of the tribe that gave its name to
+the country, Mango Bell, King of the Cameroons. His brother, Prince
+William, sells photographs and "souvenirs." We bought photographs,
+and on the strength of that hinted at a presentation at court.
+Brother William seemed doubtful, so we bought enough postal cards to
+establish us as _etrangers de distinction_, and he sent up our
+names. With Pivani, Hatton & Cookson's chief clerk we were escorted
+to the royal presence. The palace is a fantastic, pagoda-like
+building of three stories; and furnished with many mirrors, carved
+oak sideboards, and lamp-shades of colored glass. Mango Bell, King
+of the Cameroons, sounds like a character in a comic opera, but the
+king was an extremely serious, tall, handsome, and self-respecting
+negro. Having been educated in England, he spoke much more correct
+English than any of us. Of the few "Kings I Have Met," both tame and
+wild, his manners were the most charming. Back of the palace is an
+enormously long building under one roof. Here live his thirty-five
+queens. To them we were not presented.
+
+ [Illustration: The Palace of the King of the Cameroons.]
+
+Prince William asked me if I knew where in America there was a
+street called Fifth Avenue. I suggested New York. He referred to a
+large Bible, and finding, much to his surprise, that my guess was
+correct, commissioned me to buy him, from a firm on that street,
+just such another Bible as the one in his hand. He forgot to give me
+the money to pay for it, but loaned us a half-dozen little princes
+to bear our purchases to the wharf. For this service their royal
+highnesses graciously condescended to receive a small "dash," and
+with the chief clerk were especially delighted. He, being a
+sleight-of-hand artist, apparently took five-franc pieces out of
+their Sunday clothes and from their kinky hair. When we left they
+were rapidly disrobing to find if any more five-franc pieces were
+concealed about their persons.
+
+The morning after we sailed from Duala we anchored in the river in
+front of Calabar, the capital of Southern Nigeria. Of all the ports
+at which we touched on the Coast, Calabar was the hottest, the best
+looking, and the best administered. It is a model colony, but to
+bring it to the state it now enjoys has cost sums of money entirely
+out of proportion to those the colony has earned. The money has been
+spent in cutting down the jungle, filling in swamps that breed
+mosquitoes and fever, and in laying out gravel walks, water mains,
+and open cement gutters, and in erecting model hospitals, barracks,
+and administrative offices. Even grass has been made to grow, and
+the high bluff upon which are situated the homes of the white
+officials and Government House has been trimmed and cultivated and
+tamed until it looks like an English park. It is a complete
+imitation, even to golf links and tennis courts. But the fight that
+has been made against the jungle has not stopped with golf links. In
+1896 the death rate was ten men out of every hundred. That
+corresponds to what in warfare is a decimating fire, upon which an
+officer, without danger of reproof, may withdraw his men. But at
+Calabar the English doctors did not withdraw, and now the death rate
+is as low as three out of every hundred. That Calabar, or any part
+of the West Coast, will ever be made entirely healthy is doubtful.
+Man can cut down a forest and fill in a swamp, but he can not reach
+up, as to a gas jet, and turn off the sun. And at Calabar, even at
+night when the sun has turned itself off, the humidity and the heat
+leave one sweating, tossing, and gasping for air. In Calabar the
+first thing a white man learns is not to take any liberties with the
+sun. When he dresses, eats, drinks, and moves about the sun is as
+constantly on his mind, as it is on the face of the sun-dial. The
+chief ascent to the top of the bluff where the white people live is
+up a steep cement walk about eighty yards long. At the foot of this
+a white man will be met by four hammock-bearers, and you will see
+him get into the hammock and be carried in it the eighty yards.
+
+For even that short distance he is taking no chances. But while he
+nurses his vitality and cares for his health he does not use the sun
+as an excuse for laziness or for slipshod work. I have never seen a
+place in the tropics where, in spite of the handicap of damp, fierce
+heat, the officers and civil officials are so keenly and constantly
+employed, where the bright work was so bright, and the whitewash so
+white.
+
+Out at the barracks of the West African Frontier Force, the
+W.A.F.F.'s, the officers, instead of from the shade of the veranda
+watching the non-coms. teach a native the manual, were themselves at
+work, and each was howling orders at the black recruits and smashing
+a gun against his hip and shoulder as smartly as a drill sergeant. I
+found the standard maintained at Calabar the more interesting
+because the men were almost entirely their own audience. If they
+make the place healthy, and attractive-looking, and dress for
+dinner, and shy at cocktails, and insist that their tan shoes shall
+glow like meershaum pipes, it is not because of the refining
+presence of lovely women, but because the men themselves like things
+that way. The men of Calabar have learned that when the sun is at
+110, morals, like material things, disintegrate, and that, though
+the temptation is to go about in bath-room slippers and pajamas, one
+is wiser to bolster up his drenched and drooping spirit with a stiff
+shirt front and a mess jacket. They tell that in a bush station in
+upper Nigeria, one officer got his D.S.O. because with an audience
+of only a white sergeant he persisted in a habit of shaving twice a
+day.
+
+ [Illustration: The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell.]
+
+There are very few women in Calabar. There are three or four who are
+wives of officials, two nurses employed by the government, and the
+Mother Superior and Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph, and, of
+course, all of them are great belles. For the Sisters, especially
+the officers, the government people, the traders, the natives, even
+the rival missionaries, have the most tremendous respect and
+admiration. The sacrifice of the woman who, to be near her husband
+on the Coast, consents to sicken and fade and grow old before her
+time, and of the nurse who, to preserve the health of others, risks
+her own, is very great; but the sacrifice of the Sisters, who have
+renounced all thought of home and husband, and who have exiled
+themselves to this steaming swamp-land, seems the most unselfish. In
+order to support the 150 little black boys and girls who are at
+school at the mission, the Sisters rob themselves of everything
+except the little that will keep them alive. Two, in addition to
+their work at the mission, act as nurses in the English hospital,
+and for that they receive together $600. This forms the sole regular
+income of the five women; for each $120 a year. With anything else
+that is given them in charity, they buy supplies for the little
+converts. They live in a house of sandstone and zinc that holds the
+heat like a flat-iron, they are obliged to wear a uniform that is of
+material and fashion so unsuited to the tropics that Dr. Chichester,
+in charge of the hospital, has written in protest against it to
+Rome, and on many days they fast, not because the Church bids them
+so to do, but because they have no food. And with it all, these five
+gentlewomen are always eager, cheerful, sweet of temper, and a
+living blessing to all who meet them. What now troubles them is that
+they have no room to accommodate the many young heathen who come to
+them to be taught to wear clothes, and to be good little boys and
+girls. This is causing the Sisters great distress. Any one who does
+not believe in that selfish theory, that charity begins at home, but
+who would like to help to spread Christianity in darkest Africa and
+give happiness to five noble women, who are giving their lives for
+others, should send a postal money order to Marie T. Martin, the
+Reverend Mother Superior of the Catholic Mission of Old Calabar,
+Southern Nigeria.
+
+And if you are going to do it, as they say in the advertising pages,
+"Do it now!"
+
+ [Illustration: The Mother Superior and Sisters of St. Joseph and
+ Their Converts at Old Calabar.]
+
+At Calabar there is a royal prisoner, the King of Benin. He is not
+an agreeable king like His Majesty of the Cameroons, but a grossly
+fat, sensual-looking young man, who, a few years ago, when he was at
+war with the English, made "ju ju" against them by sacrificing three
+hundred maidens, his idea being that the ju ju would drive the
+English out of Benin. It was poor ju ju, for it drove the young man
+himself out of Benin, and now he is a king in exile. As far as I
+could see, the social position of the king is insecure, and
+certainly in Calabar he does not move in the first circles. One
+afternoon, when the four or five ladies of Calabar and Mr. Bedwell,
+the Acting Commissioner, and the officers of the W.A.F.F.'s were at
+the clubhouse having ice-drinks, the king at the head of a retinue
+of cabinet officers, high priests, and wives bore down upon the
+club-house with the evident intention of inviting himself to tea.
+Personally, I should like to have met a young man who could murder
+three hundred girls and worry over it so little that he had not lost
+one of his three hundred pounds, but the others were considerably
+annoyed and sent an A.D.C. to tell him to "Move on!" as though he
+were an organ-grinder, or a performing bear.
+
+"These kings," exclaimed a subaltern of the W.A.F.F.'s, indignantly,
+"are trying to push in everywhere!"
+
+When we departed from Calabar, the only thing that reconciled me to
+leaving it and its charming people, was the fact that when the ship
+moved there was a breeze. While at anchor in the river I had found
+that not being able to breathe by day or to sleep by night in time
+is trying, even to the stoutest constitution.
+
+One of the married ladies of Calabar, her husband, an officer of
+the W.A.F.F.'s, and the captain of the police sailed on the
+_Nigeria_ "on leave," and all Calabar came down to do them honor.
+There was the commissioner's gig, and the marine captain's gig, and
+the police captain's gig, and the gig from "Matilda's," the English
+trading house, and one from the Dutch house and the French house,
+and each gig was manned by black boys in beautiful uniforms and
+fezzes, and each crew fought to tie up to the foot of the
+accommodation ladder. It was as gay as a regatta. On the
+quarter-deck the officers drank champagne, in the captain's cabin
+Hughes treated the traders to beer, in the "square" the non-coms. of
+the W.A.F.F.'s drank ale. The men who were going away on leave tried
+not to look too happy, and those who were going back to the shore
+drank deep and tried not to appear too carelessly gay. A billet on
+the West Coast is regarded by the man who accepts it as a sort of
+sporting proposition, as a game of three innings of nine months
+each, during which he matches his health against the Coast. If he
+lives he wins; if he dies the Coast wins.
+
+After Calabar, at each port off which we anchored, at Ponny,
+Focardos, Lagos, Accra, Cape Coast Castle, and Sekonni, it was
+always the same. Always there came over the side the man going
+"Home," the man who had fought with the Coast and won. He was as
+excited, as jubilant as a prisoner sentenced to death who had
+escaped his executioners. And always the heartiest in their
+congratulations were the men who were left behind, his brother
+officers, or his fellow traders, the men of the Sun Hat Brigade, in
+their unofficial uniforms, in shirtwaists, broad belts from which
+dangled keys and a whistle, beautifully polished tan boots, and with
+a wand-like whip or stick of elephant hide. They swarmed the decks
+and overwhelmed the escaping refugee with good wishes. He had
+cheated their common enemy. By merely keeping alive he had achieved
+a glorious victory. In their eyes he had performed a feat of
+endurance like swimming the English Channel. They crowded to
+congratulate him as people at the pit-mouth congratulate the
+entombed miner, who, after many days of breathing noisome gases,
+drinks the pure air. Even the black boys seem to feel the triumph
+of the white master, and their paddles never flashed so bravely, and
+their songs never rang so wildly, as when they were racing him away
+from the brooding Coast with its poisonous vapors toward the big
+white ship that meant health and home.
+
+Although most of the ports we saw only from across a mile or two of
+breakers, they always sent us something of interest. Sometimes all
+the male passengers came on board drunk. With the miners of the Gold
+Coast and the "Palm Oil Ruffians" it used to be a matter of
+etiquette not to leave the Coast in any other condition. Not so to
+celebrate your escape seemed ungenerous and ungrateful. At Sekondi
+one of the miners from Ashanti was so completely drunk, that he was
+swung over the side, tied up like a plum-pudding, in a bag.
+
+When he emerged from the bag his expression of polite inquiry was
+one with which all could sympathize. To lose consciousness on the
+veranda of a cafe, and awake with a bump on the deck of a steamer
+many miles at sea, must strengthen one's belief in magic carpets.
+
+Another entertainment for the white passengers was when the boat
+boys fought for the black passengers as they were lowered in the
+mammy-chair. As a rule, in the boats from shore, there were twelve
+boys to paddle and three or four extra men to handle and unhook the
+mammy-chair and the luggage. While the boys with the paddles
+manoeuvred to bring their boat next to the ship's side, the extra
+boys tried to pull their rivals overboard, dragging their hands from
+ropes and gunwales, and beating them with paddles. They did this
+while every second the boat under them was spinning in the air or
+diving ten feet into the hollow of the waves, and trying to smash
+itself and every other boat into driftwood. From the deck the second
+officer would swing a mammy-chair over the side with the idea of
+dropping it into one of these boats. But before the chair could be
+lowered, a rival boat would shove the first one away, and with a
+third boat would be fighting for its place. Meanwhile, high above
+the angry sea, the chair and its cargo of black women would be
+twirling like a weathercock and banging against the ship's side. The
+mammies were too terrified to scream, but the ship's officers
+yelled and swore, the boat's crews shrieked, and the black babies
+howled. Each baby was strapped between the shoulders of the mother.
+A mammy-chair is like one of those two-seated swings in which people
+sit facing one another. If to the shoulders of each person in the
+swing was tied a baby, it is obvious that should the swing bump into
+anything, the baby would get the worst of it. That is what happened
+in the mammy-chair. Every time the chair spun around, the head of a
+baby would come "crack!" against the ship's side. So the babies
+howled, and no one of the ship's passengers, crowded six deep along
+the rail, blamed them. The skull of the Ethiopian may be hard, but
+it is most unfair to be swathed like a mummy so that you can neither
+kick nor strike back, and then have your head battered against a
+five-thousand-ton ship.
+
+How the boys who paddled the shore boats live long enough to learn
+how to handle them is a great puzzle. We were told that the method
+was to take out one green boy with a crew of eleven experts. But how
+did the original eleven become experts? At Accra, where the waves
+are very high and rough, are the best boat boys on the coast. We
+watched the Custom House boat fight her way across the two miles of
+surf to the shore. The fight lasted two hours. It was as thrilling
+as watching a man cross Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. The greater
+part of the two hours the boat stood straight in the air, as though
+it meant to shake the crew into the sea, and the rest of the time it
+ran between walls of water ten feet high and was entirely lost to
+sight. Two things about the paddling on the West Coast make it
+peculiar; the boys sit, not on the thwarts, but on the gunwales, as
+a woman rides a side-saddle, and in many parts of the coast the boys
+use paddles shaped like a fork or a trident. One asks how, sitting
+as they do, they are able to brace themselves, and how with their
+forked paddles they obtained sufficient resistance. A coaster's
+explanation of the split paddle was that the boys did not want any
+more resistance than they could prevent.
+
+ [Illustration: The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
+ Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle.]
+
+There is no more royal manner of progress than when one of these
+boats lifts you over the waves, with the boys chanting some wild
+chorus, with their bare bodies glistening, their teeth and eyes
+shining, the splendid muscles straining, and the dripping paddles
+flashing like twelve mirrors.
+
+Some of the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power,
+and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in
+unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a
+sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to the
+newly rich.
+
+I knew I had left the West Coast when, the very night we sailed from
+Sierra Leone, for greater comfort, I reached for a linen bed-spread
+that during four stifling, reeking weeks had lain undisturbed at the
+foot of the berth. During that time I had hated it as a monstrous
+thing; as something as hot and heavy as a red flannel blanket, as a
+buffalo robe. And when, on the following night, I found the
+wind-screen was not in the air port, and that, nevertheless, I still
+was alive, I knew we had passed out of reach of the Equator, and
+that all that followed would be as conventional as the "trippers"
+who joined us at the Canary Isles; and as familiar as the low, gray
+skies, the green, rain-soaked hills, and the complaining Channel
+gulls that convoyed us into Plymouth Harbor.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+ALONG THE EAST COAST
+
+
+Were a man picked up on a flying carpet and dropped without warning
+into Lorenco Marquez, he might guess for a day before he could make
+up his mind where he was, or determine to which nation the place
+belonged.
+
+If he argued from the adobe houses with red-tiled roofs and walls of
+cobalt blue, the palms, and the yellow custom-house, he might think
+he was in Santiago; the Indian merchants in velvet and gold
+embroideries seated in deep, dark shops which breathe out dry,
+pungent odors, might take him back to Bombay; the Soudanese and
+Egyptians in long blue night-gowns and freshly ironed fezzes would
+remind him of Cairo; the dwarfish Portuguese soldiers, of Madeira,
+Lisbon, and Madrid, and the black, bare-legged policemen in khaki
+with great numerals on their chests, of Benin, Sierra Leone, or
+Zanzibar. After he had noted these and the German, French, and
+English merchants in white duck, and the Dutch man-of-warsmen, who
+look like ship's stewards, the French marines in coal-scuttle
+helmets, the British Jack-tars in their bare feet, and the native
+Kaffir women, each wrapped in a single, gorgeous shawl with a black
+baby peering from beneath her shoulder-blades, he would decide, by
+using the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, that he was in the
+Midway of the Chicago Fair.
+
+Several hundred years ago Da Gama sailed into Delagoa Bay and
+founded the town of Lorenco Marquez, and since that time the
+Portuguese have always felt that it is only due to him and to
+themselves to remain there. They have great pride of race, and they
+like the fact that they possess and govern a colony. So, up to the
+present time, in spite of many temptations to dispose of it, they
+have made the ownership of Delagoa Bay an article of their national
+religion. But their national religion does not require of them to
+improve their property. And to-day it is much as it was when the
+sails of Da Gama's fleet first stirred its poisonous vapors.
+
+The harbor itself is an excellent one and the bay is twenty-two
+miles along, but there is only one landing-pier, and that such a
+pier as would be considered inconsistent with the dignity of the
+Larchmont Yacht Club. To the town itself Portugal has been content
+to contribute as her share the gatherers of taxes, collectors of
+customs and dispensers of official seals. She is indifferent to the
+fact that the bulk of general merchandise, wine, and machinery that
+enter her port is brought there by foreigners. She only demands that
+they buy her stamps. Her importance in her own colony is that of a
+toll-gate at the entrance of a great city.
+
+Lorenco Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home.
+When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen
+a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried
+hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months,
+the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were
+robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about one of the
+twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and
+unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of
+Lorenco Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and
+selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous
+of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its
+patrons that "Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests
+will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by
+the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the
+"tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had
+found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat
+difficult.
+
+On her way from Lorenco Marquez to Beira our ship, the _Kanzlar_,
+kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow
+sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of
+outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue
+mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great
+inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern
+coast and against which the waves break with a report like the
+bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and
+the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills
+accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw
+Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four
+stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the
+summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the
+sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the
+lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were
+more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It
+suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the
+board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her
+Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing
+except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this
+should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the
+Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and
+instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt
+were only opened for the summer season and which for the rest of
+the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial
+gales. Beira need only to have added to her "Sea-View" and "Beach"
+hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type
+artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home.
+Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and
+Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and
+Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many
+ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were
+moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Lorenco
+Marquez, was brisk, busy, and clean. Although both are ostensibly
+Portuguese, Beira is to Lorenco Marquez what the cleanest street of
+Greenwich Village, of New York City, is to "Hell's Kitchen" and the
+Chinese Quarter. The houses were well swept and cool, the shops were
+alluring, the streets were of clean shifting white sand, and the
+sidewalks, of gray cement, were as well kept as a Philadelphia
+doorstep. The most curious feature of Beira is her private tram-car
+system. These cars run on tiny tracks which rise out of the sand
+and extend from one end of the town to the other, with branch lines
+running into the yards of shops and private houses. The motive power
+for these cars is supplied by black boys who run behind and push
+them. Their trucks are about half as large as those on the hand-cars
+we see flying along our railroad tracks at home, worked by gangs of
+Italian laborers. On some of the trucks there is only a bench,
+others are shaded by awnings, and a few have carriage-lamps and
+cushioned seats and carpets. Each of them is a private conveyance;
+there is not one which can be hired by the public. When a merchant
+wishes to go down town to the port, his black boys carry his private
+tram-car from his garden and settle it on the rails, the merchant
+seats himself, and the boys push him and his baby-carriage to
+whatever part of the city he wishes to go. When his wife is out
+shopping and stops at a store the boys lift her car into the sand in
+order to make a clear track for any other car which may be coming
+behind them. One would naturally suppose that with the tracks and
+switch-boards and sidings already laid, the next step would be to
+place cars upon them for the convenience of the public, but this is
+not the case, and the tracks through the city are jealously reserved
+for the individuals who tax themselves five pounds a year to extend
+them and to keep them in repair. After the sleds on the island of
+Madeira these private street-cars of Beira struck me as being the
+most curious form of conveyance I had ever seen.
+
+ [Illustration: Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira.]
+
+Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of
+feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some
+of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of
+Cape Town and Durban. But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on
+the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company's possessions,
+and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was
+necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build
+a railroad through the swamp and jungle. This road is now in
+operation. It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the
+brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress
+through the marshes, two hundred of the men working on it died of
+fever. Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the
+Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the
+Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police. How this
+was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied,
+Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of "Judson and the
+Empire." It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored
+it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat. A
+week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all
+the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had
+made no mention of the fact. The result was that the _Kanzlar_ was
+hung up for twenty-four hours. We tried to comfort ourselves by
+thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which
+had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of
+empire.
+
+The _Kanzlar_ could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the
+_Adjutant_, which belongs to the same line and which was created for
+these shallow waters, came to the _Kanzlar_, bringing Chinde with
+her. She brought every white man in the port, and those who could
+not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the _Adjutant_,
+clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed
+high above us. For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as
+though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that
+brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the
+pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the _Adjutant_, in white
+duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of
+Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower
+deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as
+Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and
+gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new
+leather cases. From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and
+from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in
+fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian
+coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound
+and unwound long blue strips of cotton about their shoulders, or
+ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading
+required. Among these strange peoples were goats, as delicately
+colored as a meerschaum pipe, and with the horns of our red deer,
+strange white oxen with humps behind the shoulders, those that are
+exhibited in cages at home as "sacred buffalo," but which here are
+only patient beasts of burden, and gray monkeys, wildcats, snakes
+and crocodiles in cages addressed to "Hagenbeck, Hamburg." The
+freight was no less curious; assegais in bundles, horns stretching
+for three feet from point to point, or rising straight, like
+poignards; skins, ground-nuts, rubber, and heavy blocks of bees-wax
+wrapped in coarse brown sacking, and which in time will burn before
+the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Italy, Spain, and France.
+
+People of the "Bromide" class who run across a friend from their own
+city in Paris will say, "Well, to think of meeting _you_ here. How
+small the world is after all!" If they wish a better proof of how
+really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the
+existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports twenty stores in
+Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not
+the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man
+who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the
+latitudes together and made the world the small department store it
+is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.
+
+The explorer tells you, "I was the first man to climb Kilamajaro."
+"I was the first to cut a path from the shores of Lake Nyassa into
+the Congo Basin." He even lectures about it, in front of a wet sheet
+in the light of a stereopticon, and because he has added some miles
+of territory to the known world, people buy his books and learned
+societies place initials after his distinguished name. But before
+his grandfather was born and long before he ever disturbed the
+waters of Nyassa the Phoenicians and Arabs and Portuguese and men
+of his own time and race had been there before him to buy ivory,
+both white and black, to exchange beads and brass bars and
+shaving-mirrors for the tusks of elephants, raw gold, copra, rubber,
+and the feathers of the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a
+study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its
+way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in
+consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts
+which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But
+that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear
+at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders,
+backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast
+of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships
+faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire
+Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre
+Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being
+planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want
+tires for their automobiles; and because the fashionable ornament of
+the natives of Swaziland is, for no reason, no longer blue-glass
+beads, manufacturers of beads in Switzerland and Italy find
+themselves out of pocket by some thousands and thousands of pounds.
+
+The traders who were making the world smaller by bringing cotton
+prints to Chinde to cover her black nakedness, her British Majesty's
+consul at that port, and the boy lieutenant of the paddle-wheeled
+gunboat which patrols the Zambesi River, were the gentlemen who
+informed me that they were the only respectable members of Chinde
+society. They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom
+the _Kanzlar_ might have picked up from a desert island, where they
+had been marooned and left to rot. They observed the gilded glory of
+the _Kanzlar_ smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables,
+with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all
+the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus.
+The boy-commander of the gunboat gazed at white women in the saloon
+with fascinated admiration.
+
+"I have never," he declared, breathlessly, "I have never seen so
+many beautiful women in one place at the same time! I'd forgotten
+that there were so many white people in the world."
+
+"If I stay on board this ship another minute I shall go home," said
+Her Majesty's consul, firmly. "You will have to hold me. It's coming
+over me--I feel it coming. I shall never have the strength to go
+back." He appealed to the sympathetic lieutenant. "Let's desert
+together," he begged.
+
+ [Illustration: One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
+ Mozambique.]
+
+In the swamps of the East Coast the white exiles lay aside the
+cloaks and masks of crowded cities. They do not try to conceal their
+feelings, their vices, or their longings. They talk to the first
+white stranger they meet of things which in the great cities a man
+conceals even from his room-mate, and men they would not care to
+know, and whom they would never meet in the fixed social pathways of
+civilization, they take to their hearts as friends. They are too few
+to be particular, they have no choice, and they ask no questions. It
+is enough that the white man, like themselves, is condemned to
+exile. They do not try to find solace in the thought that they are
+the "foretrekkers" of civilization, or take credit to themselves
+because they are the path-finders and the pioneers who bear the heat
+and burden of the day. They are sorry for themselves, because they
+know, more keenly than any outsider can know, how good is the life
+they have given up, and how hard is the one they follow, but they do
+not ask anyone else to be sorry. They would be very much surprised
+if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and
+Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good
+and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.
+
+On the day they boarded the _Kanzlar_ the pains of nostalgia were
+sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves
+of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own
+condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck,
+as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even
+boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess,
+who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.
+
+A little English boy ran through the smoking-room, and they fell
+upon him, and quarrelled for the privilege of holding him on their
+knees. He was a shy, coquettish little English boy, and the
+boisterous, noisy men did not appeal to him. To them he meant home
+and family and the old nursery, papered with colored pictures from
+the Christmas _Graphic_. His stout, bare legs and tangled curls and
+sailor's hat, with "H.M.S. Mars" across it, meant all that was clean
+and sweet-smelling in their past lives.
+
+"I'll arrest you for a deserter," said the lieutenant of the
+gunboat. "I'll make the consul send you back to the _Mars_." He held
+the boy on his knee fearfully, handling him as though he were some
+delicate and precious treasure that might break if he dropped it.
+
+The agent of the Oceanic Development Company, Limited, whose
+business in life is to drive savage Angonis out of the jungle, where
+he hopes in time to see the busy haunts of trade, begged for the boy
+with eloquent pleading.
+
+"You've had the kiddie long enough now," he urged. "Let me have him.
+Come here, Mr. Mars, and sit beside me, and I'll give you fizzy
+water--like lemon-squash, only nicer." He held out a wet bottle of
+champagne alluringly.
+
+"No, he is coming to his consul," that youth declared. "He's coming
+to his consul for protection. You are not fit characters to
+associate with an innocent child. Come to me, little boy, and do not
+listen to those degraded persons." So the "innocent child" seated
+himself between the consul and the chartered trader, and they patted
+his fat calves and red curls and took his minute hands in their
+tanned fists, eying him hungrily, like two cannibals. But the little
+boy was quite unconscious and inconsiderate of their hunger, and,
+with the cruelty of children, pulled himself free and ran away.
+
+"He was such a nice little kiddie," they said, apologetically, as
+though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.
+
+"I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years,"
+said the lieutenant, genially. "But fancy your knowing Sparks! He
+has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and
+he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the
+lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's
+where we hit it off--we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I
+suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down
+here. I know Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to
+talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks
+has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred
+miles."
+
+I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely
+that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and
+spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the
+second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized
+a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were
+sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving
+themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a "disgusting
+practice," and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the
+lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.
+
+"Yes," he said; "and what's worse is that we're here for two years
+more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China.
+Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old,
+and the steamer stops once every month."
+
+ [Illustration: Custom House, Zanzibar.]
+
+Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side,
+so we had time in which to give the exiles the news of the outside
+world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one
+as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy;
+how another had sold "ready to wear" clothes in a New York
+department store, and another had been attache at Madrid, and
+another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We
+exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would
+meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many
+bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect
+the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.
+
+But at last the ship's whistle blew with raucous persistence. It was
+final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which
+once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages,
+of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and
+flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the
+mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the
+_Kanzlar_ became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon
+line.
+
+I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them
+until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to
+borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with
+never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean
+land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty
+group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was
+more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall
+never meet them again--we had just burned signals as our ships
+passed in the night--and yet, I must always consider among the
+friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways
+straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi,
+"the only respectable members of Chinde Society."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: NOTE--I did not lose the white-clad youths. The
+lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a
+consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde
+newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also,
+should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.
+He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the
+_Kanzlar_, alone prevented his social position being publicly
+recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though
+tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society. R.H.D.]
+
+The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his
+contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one
+which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its
+inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown
+jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the
+captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down
+with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the
+slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the
+casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the
+sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the
+shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the
+harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by
+the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of
+the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom
+this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of
+honor.
+
+ [Illustration: Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar.]
+
+Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great
+slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who
+fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a
+fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison
+and all the inhabitants as well. To-day the slave-trade brings to
+those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but
+the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain,
+and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and
+red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been
+so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has
+taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The
+streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their
+silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day,
+which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no
+footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs.
+The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares
+to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no
+carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and
+refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the
+city, and with the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only
+wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.
+
+I have never visited a city which so impressed one with the fact
+that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred
+years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is,
+on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with
+dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving
+above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city
+of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as
+letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and
+the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy
+curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers
+of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along
+the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great
+blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated
+checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are
+palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and
+churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard
+the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the
+churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty
+stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the
+actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the
+fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous
+period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers,"
+and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within
+its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery,
+when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and
+the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the
+market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of
+bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves
+bought and sold.
+
+In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of
+East Africa from south of Lorenco Marquez to north of Mozambique,
+and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog
+in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to
+help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he
+keeps those who would improve both from gaining any hold or
+influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East
+Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now
+surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack
+of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the
+country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side.
+They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely
+lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats
+they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new
+territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars
+them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth
+undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his cafe at the coast
+and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the
+native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and
+the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to
+cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them
+no protection.
+
+The land back of Mozambique is divided into "holdings," and the rent
+of each holding is based upon the number of native huts it
+contains. The tax per hut is one pound a year, and these holdings
+are leased to any Portuguese who promises to pay the combined taxes
+of all the huts. He also engages to cut new roads, to keep those
+already made in repair, and to furnish a sufficient number of police
+to maintain order. The lessees of these holdings have given rise to
+many and terrible scandals. In the majority of cases, the lessee,
+once out of reach of all authority and of public opinion, and
+wielding the power of life and death, becomes a tyrant and
+task-master over his district, taxing the natives to five and ten
+times the amount which each is supposed to furnish, and treating
+them virtually as his bondsmen. Up along the Shire River, the
+lessees punish the blacks by hanging them from a tree by their
+ankles and beating their bare backs with rhinoceros hide, until, as
+it has been described to me by a reputable English resident, the
+blood runs in a stream over the negro's shoulders, and forms a pool
+beneath his eyes.
+
+ [Illustration: The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking,
+ Is Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A.]
+
+You hear of no legitimate enterprise fostered by these lessees, of
+no development of natural resources, but, instead, you are told
+tales of sickening cruelty, and you can read in the consular
+reports others quite as true; records of heartless treatment of
+natives, of neglect of great resources, and of hurried snatching at
+the year's crop and a return to the Coast, with nothing to show of
+sustained effort or steady development. The incompetence of Portugal
+cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the
+Boer, she will find the seaport of Lorenco Marquez too necessary to
+her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the
+Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the
+Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African
+Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to
+make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It
+seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little
+kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to
+benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she will
+withdraw from it, in favor of those who are fitter to survive her.
+
+There is no more interesting contrast along the coast of East
+Africa than that presented by the colonies of England, Germany, and
+Portugal. Of these three, the colonies of the Englishmen are, as one
+expects to find them, the healthiest, the busiest, and the most
+prosperous. They thrive under your very eyes; you feel that they
+were established where they are, not by accident, not to gratify a
+national vanity or a ruler's ambition, but with foresight and with
+knowledge, and with the determination to make money; and that they
+will increase and flourish because they are situated where the
+natives and settlers have something to sell, and where the men can
+bring, in return, something the natives and colonials wish to buy.
+Port Elizabeth, Durban, East London, and Zanzibar belong to this
+prosperous class, which gives good reason for the faith of those who
+founded them.
+
+On the other hand, as opposed to these, there are the settlements of
+the Portuguese, rotten and corrupt, and the German settlements of
+Dar Es Salaam and Tanga which have still to prove their right to
+exist. Outwardly, to the eye, they are model settlements. Dar Es
+Salaam, in particular, is a beautiful and perfectly appointed
+colonial town. In the care in which it is laid out, in the
+excellence of its sanitary arrangements, in its cleanliness, and in
+the magnificence of its innumerable official residences, and in
+their sensible adaptability to the needs of the climate, one might
+be deceived into believing that Dar Es Salaam is the beautiful
+gateway of a thriving and busy colony. But there are no ramparts of
+merchandise along her wharves, no bulwarks of strangely scented
+bales blocking her water-front; no lighters push hurriedly from the
+shore to meet the ship, although she is a German ship, or to receive
+her cargo of articles "made in Germany." On the contrary, her
+freight is unloaded at the English ports, and taken on at English
+ports. And the German traders who send their merchandise to Hamburg
+in her hold come over the side at Zanzibar, at Durban, and at Aden,
+where the English merchants find in them fierce competitors. There
+is nothing which goes so far to prove the falsity of the saying that
+"trade follows the flag" as do these model German colonies with
+their barracks, governor's palace, officers' clubs, public pleasure
+parks, and with no trade; and the English colonies, where the German
+merchants remain, and where, under the English flag, they grow
+steadily rich. The German Emperor, believing that colonies are a
+source of strength to an empire, rather than the weakness that they
+are, has raised the German flag in Central East Africa, but the
+ships of the German East African Company, subsidized by him, carry
+their merchandize to the English ports, and his German subjects
+remain where they can make the most money. They do not move to those
+ports where the flag of their country would wave over them.
+
+Dar Es Salaam, although it lacks the one thing needful to make it a
+model settlement, possesses all the other things which are needful,
+and many which are pure luxuries. Its residences, as I have said,
+have been built after the most approved scientific principles of
+ventilation and sanitation. In no tropical country have I seen
+buildings so admirably adapted to the heat and climatic changes and
+at the same time more in keeping with the surrounding scenery. They
+are handsome, cool-looking, white and clean, with broad verandas,
+high walls, and false roofs under which currents of air are lured in
+spite of themselves. The residences are set back along the high bank
+which faces the bay. In front of them is a public promenade, newly
+planted shade-trees arch over it, and royal palms reach up to it
+from the very waters of the harbor. At one end of this semicircle
+are the barracks of the Soudanese soldiers, and at the other is the
+official palace of the governor. Everything in the settlement is
+new, and everything is built on the scale of a city, and with the
+idea of accommodating a great number of people. Hotels and cafes,
+better than any one finds in the older settlements along the coast,
+are arranged on the water-front, and there is a church capable of
+seating the entire white population at one time. If the place is to
+grow, it can do so only through trade, and when trade really comes
+all these palaces and cafes and barracks which occupy the entire
+water-front will have to be pushed back to make way for warehouses
+and custom-house sheds. At present it is populated only by
+officials, and, I believe, twelve white women.
+
+ [Illustration: The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage.]
+
+You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a
+box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this
+beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and
+emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at
+a world's fair as an example of a model village.
+
+In writing of Zanzibar I am embarrassed by the knowledge that I am
+not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first
+sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage
+out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me
+made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.
+
+Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of
+high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand
+at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the
+people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run
+ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass
+of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty
+fortress-like facade before you, and a strip of white sand is at
+your feet.
+
+And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind
+resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack
+in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls
+where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak,
+and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.
+
+In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous,
+unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework,
+windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of
+the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue,
+and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and
+the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East
+African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering
+walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either
+actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and
+glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him;
+the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their
+children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and
+bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you
+with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare
+shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows
+dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long
+and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of
+richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces
+of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts,
+and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of
+the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it
+is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.
+
+The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think
+Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in
+your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a
+vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of
+Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it
+healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection
+for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm
+government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of
+this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb
+of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous
+life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but
+they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at
+all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does
+in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in
+Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers
+alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so
+infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for
+those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly
+for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.
+
+ [Illustration: H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan
+ of Zanzibar.]
+
+Zanzibar is an "Arabian Nights" city, a comic-opera capital, a most
+difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any
+house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and
+decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel
+sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe
+walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a
+carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing
+will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that
+the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the
+next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will
+prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.
+
+Several hundred years ago the Sultans of Zanzibar grew powerful and
+wealthy through exporting slaves and ivory from the mainland. These
+were not two separate industries, but one was developed by the other
+and was dependent upon it. The procedure was brutally simple. A
+slave-trader, having first paid his tribute to the Sultan, crossed
+to the mainland, and marching into the interior made his bargain
+with one of the local chiefs for so much ivory, and for so many men
+to carry it down to the coast. Without some such means of transport
+there could have been no bargain, so the chief who was anxious to
+sell would select a village which had not paid him the taxes due
+him, and bid the trader help himself to what men he found there.
+Then would follow a hideous night attack, a massacre of women and
+children, and the taking prisoners of all able-bodied males. These
+men, chained together in long lines, and each bearing a heavy tooth
+of ivory upon his shoulder, would be whipped down to the coast. It
+was only when they had carried the ivory there, and their work was
+finished, that the idea presented itself of selling them as well as
+the ivory. Later, these bearers became of equal value with the
+ivory, and the raiding of native villages and the capture of men and
+women to be sold into slavery developed into a great industry. The
+industry continues fitfully to-day, but it is carried on under great
+difficulties, and at a risk of heavy punishments. What is called
+"domestic slavery" is recognized on the island of Zanzibar, the vast
+clove plantations which lie back of the port employing many hundreds
+of these domestic slaves. It is not to free these from their slight
+bondage that the efforts of those who are trying to suppress the
+slave-trade is to-day directed, but to prevent others from being
+added to their number. What slave-trading there is at present is by
+Arabs and Indians. They convey the slaves in dhows from the mainland
+to Madagascar, Arabia, or southern Persia, and to the Island of
+Pemba, which lies north of Zanzibar, and only fifteen miles from the
+mainland. If a slave can be brought this short distance in safety he
+can be sold for five hundred dollars; on the mainland he is not
+worth more than fifteen dollars. The channels, and the mouths of
+rivers, and the little bays opening from the Island of Pemba are
+patrolled more or less regularly by British gunboats, and junior
+officers in charge of a cutter and a crew of half a dozen men, are
+detached from these for a few months at a time on "boat service." It
+seems to be an unprofitable pursuit, for one officer told me that
+during his month of boat service he had boarded and searched three
+hundred dhows, which is an average of ten a day, and found slaves on
+only one of them. But as, on this occasion, he rescued four slaves,
+and the slavers, moreover, showed fight, and wounded him and two of
+his boat's crew, he was more than satisfied.
+
+The trade in ivory, which has none of these restrictions upon it,
+still flourishes, and the cool, dark warerooms of Zanzibar are
+stored high with it. In a corner of one little cellar they showed
+us twenty-five thousand dollars worth of these tusks piled up as
+carelessly as though they were logs in a wood-shed. One of the most
+curious sights in Zanzibar is a line of Zanzibari boys, each
+balancing a great tusk on his shoulder, worth from five hundred to
+two thousand dollars, and which is unprotected except for a piece of
+coarse sacking.
+
+ [Illustration: A German "Factory" at Tanga, the Store Below, the
+ Living Apartments Above.]
+
+The largest exporters of ivory in the world are at Zanzibar, and
+though probably few people know it, the firm which carries on this
+business belongs to New York City, and has been in the ivory trade
+with India and Africa from as far back as the fifties. In their
+house at Zanzibar they have entertained every distinguished African
+explorer, and the stories its walls have heard of native wars,
+pirate dhows, slave-dealers, the English occupation, and terrible
+marches through the jungles of the Congo, would make valuable and
+picturesque history. The firm has always held a semi-official
+position, for the reason that the United States Consul at Zanzibar,
+who should speak at least Swahili and Portuguese, is invariably
+chosen for the post from a drug-store in Yankton, Dakota, or a
+post-office in Canton, Ohio. Consequently, on arriving at Zanzibar
+he becomes homesick, and his first official act is to cable his
+resignation, and the State Department instructs whoever happens to
+be general manager of the ivory house to perform the duties of
+acting-consul. So, the ivory house has nearly always held the eagle
+of the consulate over its doorway. The manager of the ivory house,
+who at the time of our visit was also consul, is Harris Robbins
+Childs. Mr. Childs is well known in New York City, is a member of
+many clubs there, and speaks at least five languages. He understands
+the native tongue of Zanzibar so well that when the Prime Minister
+of the Sultan took us to the palace to pay our respects, Childs
+talked the language so much better than did the Sultan's own Prime
+Minister that there was in consequence much joking and laughing. The
+Sultan then was a most dignified, intelligent, and charming old
+gentleman. He was popular both with his own people, who loved him
+with a religious fervor, and with the English, who unobtrusively
+conducted his affairs.
+
+There have been sultans who have acted less wisely than does Hamud
+bin Muhamad bin Said. A few years ago one of these, Said Khaled,
+defied the British Empire as represented by several gunboats, and
+dared them to fire on his ship of war, a tramp steamer which he had
+converted into a royal yacht. The gunboats were anchored about two
+hundred yards from the palace, which stands at the water's edge, and
+at the time agreed upon, they sank the Sultan's ship of war in the
+short space of three minutes, and in a brief bombardment destroyed
+the greater part of his palace. The ship of war still rests where
+she sank, and her topmasts peer above the water only three hundred
+yards distant from the windows of the new palace. They serve as a
+constant warning to all future sultans.
+
+The new palace is of somewhat too modern architecture, and is not
+nearly as dignified as are the massive white walls of the native
+houses which surround it. But within it is a fairy palace, hung with
+silk draperies, tapestries, and hand-painted curtains; the floors
+are covered with magnificent rugs from Persia and India, and the
+reception-room is crowded with treasures of ebony, ivory, lacquer
+work, and gold and silver. There were two thrones made of silver
+dragons, with many scales, and studded with jewels. The Sultan did
+not seem to mind our openly admiring his treasures, and his
+attendants, who stood about him in gorgeous-colored silks heavy with
+gold embroideries, were evidently pleased with the deep impression
+they made upon the visitors. The Sultan was very gentle and
+courteous and human, especially in the pleasure he took over his son
+and heir, who then was at school in England, and who, on the death
+of his father, succeeded him. He seemed very much gratified when we
+suggested that there was no better training-place for a boy than an
+English public school; as Americans, he thought our opinion must be
+unprejudiced. Before he sent us away, he gave Childs, and each of
+us, a photograph of himself, one of which is reproduced in this
+book.
+
+Our next port was the German settlement of Tanga. We arrived there
+just as a blood-red sun was setting behind great and gloomy
+mountains. The place itself was bathed in damp hot vapors, and
+surrounded even to the water's edge by a steaming jungle. It was
+more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we
+had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a
+trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the
+evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp
+three lions had kept him awake until morning.
+
+ [Illustration: Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
+ Tanga.]
+
+The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports. We saw them
+only through field-glasses from the ship's side, so that there is,
+in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of
+Africa. But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the
+Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has passed
+away. It was certainly worth taking once. If I have failed to make
+that apparent, the fault lies with the writer. It is certainly not
+the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that
+"sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue," or of the
+exiles and "remittance men," or of the engineers who are building
+the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest
+which the East Coast presents in its problem of trade, of conquest,
+and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Congo and Coasts of Africa
+by Richard Harding Davis
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