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.