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.