Part 8
Passing through this dark and sombre defile into the valley of Dubova, it widens to 500 metres; the mountains again approach and reduce the width to about 200 yards. The depth at these straits varies from ten metres to fifty metres. It was through this defile that Trajan, nearly 2,000 years ago, made riverside roads and towing paths in continuation of the small canals and waterways to evade the rocks and currents and to facilitate the transport of his armies and military trains for the Roman campaigns in Central Europe. The ruins of these works are a proof of the great labour expended upon them, and also of the skill in engineering possessed by the Romans in those days. The tablets engraved on the rocks, still in part visible, commemorate their heroic deeds.
Following our course down the river, at ten kilometres from the Kazan, we come to Orsova, a rather important place of call for steamers and trading-vessels; and, now that the river is navigable for larger vessels, this place is destined, from its railway communications, etc., to become a great trading centre.
At a distance of eight kilometres from Orsova, the Iron Gate, situated between Roumania and Servia begins, and is for a length of about three kilometres the largest and most dangerous obstacle on the Lower Danube. The rocks in the channel impede the current, forming dangerous eddies and cataracts.
The Prigrada Rock rises above low water with a width of 250 metres and a length of about two kilometres, stretches in a crooked line across the river to the Roumanian shore, with a narrow channel, through which vessels of light draught only can be navigated with difficulty. The river, pouring over this rock, forms dangerous whirlpools and cataracts, requiring the greatest watchfulness, care, and experience on the part of the navigator to overcome the dangers of what has well been called “The Iron Gates.” Hundreds of steamers and vessels have been wrecked in attempting this dangerous passage.
Like many other great projects many schemes had been proposed and plans for carrying them out by different authorities had been considered, but nothing definite was done until in 1888, the Hungarian Government, under rights conferred upon it by the Berlin Treaty of 1878, and the London Treaty of 1871, undertook the work of construction and administration under the conditions of the treaties which gave them the power to levy tolls on trade ships for covering the expenses of the works.
The ceremony of the inauguration took place on the 27th of September, 1896, when the Emperor of Austria, King Charles of Roumania, and King Alexander of Servia, with an immense gathering of bishops, generals and diplomatic representatives, etc., met at Orsova, and proceeded through the Iron Gates and the beautiful and romantic Kazan Pass with a procession of six vessels, which included a monitor and torpedo boat, and accompanied by a continuous discharge of artillery and the loud huzzas of the immense gathering of soldiers, visitors and inhabitants.
Below the Iron Gates the river broadens out and the scenery is tame and uninteresting, for the vast plains of Roumania extend from the foot of the hills here to the shores of the Black Sea, and the maritime and commercial aspects of the surroundings begin to manifest themselves--the river becomes more crowded with craft of all kinds as we approach the towns on the Lower Danube.
We pass Widin, and, lower down, Sistova where, in the Russo-Turkish war, the Russians crossed the river to Plevna and the Balkan passes. Thirty-five miles lower down we reach Rustchuk, the most important Bulgarian town on the river, and fast becoming a great emporium of trade, being on the main line of railway to Constantinople, _viâ_ Varna.
We then pass Silistria and approach the longest railroad bridge in the world. This bridge crosses the Danube below Silistria, and carries the railway from Kustendji on the Black Sea into Roumania.
Braila, 125 miles from the mouth of the river, is the chief port for the shipment of produce, etc., from the grain-growing regions of Roumania and Northern Bulgaria. Here are extensive docks, grain elevators, and thousands of men of all nationalities engaged in loading steamers and sailing vessels from all countries. The British flag is everywhere present. As a commercial port the place is fast outstripping its neighbour, Galatz, fifteen miles lower down.
From Galatz to the sea, the navigation of the river, the dredging, removing of obstacles, levying of tolls, etc., is controlled by an International Commission established by treaty in 1878, since which date great improvements have been made, chiefly in the lower reaches and the Sulina mouth of the river, by the construction of groynes, revetments and cuttings to avoid the bends, and constant dredgings by powerful dredgers are carried on.
THE NIGER
J. HAMPDEN JACKSON
It will probably be a century hence before men fully realize the extent of the world’s debt to those English noblemen and gentlemen who in the last decade of the last century, sent forth Mungo Park as their emissary to find and trace specifically upon the map all he might discover as to this mysterious river. Their choice of the man was exceptionally fortunate.
I pass over all their disappointments, and the persistent courage with which they bore them, and need only remind you that these Englishmen of the African Association--soon afterwards to become the Royal Geographical Society--not only found and equipped Park and Clapperton and Lander, but it was at _their_ cost, on _their_ business and for _their_ entertainment alone, that Barth, the German explorer (whose brilliant and most accurate explorations are in our day constantly credited to his own nation instead of ours), undertook and finished his great journeys into Hausaland from North Africa.
We follow Park from his first discovery of the Niger at Sego, look with him on the breadth at that spot of its stream, realize his disappointment at having to return to England; his joy at coming for the second time to Bambarra, and then his voyage in the little craft bearing his country’s flag down to the devious waters of the unexplored river; past Kabara, from whose hill-top he might have seen Timbuktu had he but known and had he not been attacked there by the people on trying to land. Next we sail with Park past Birni, close to the capital of the former Songhay Empire, past Say, up the stream to Boussa, the capital of Borgu, 650 miles from the sea; and here on that memorable day of 1806 we see poor Park meet his death, and I hope it may not be long ere some worthy obelisk at the spot shall set forth indelibly the great record of his mission.
We come now to Richard Lander, and in like manner I take you over the route of this famous voyager, from Badagry (whence he struck inland) to Boussa, where he found the relics of Park, and then in his boats down stream past Mount Jebba--standing midway in the river, with an elevation above sea level of some 300 feet--past Rabbah--then the largest city on the Niger--to Egga, where the great ferry of the Kano-Ilorin traffic makes prosperous the chief port of Nupé, and now--in the distance--appears the table-topped Mount Patteh, rising 1,300 feet from the right bank, and as we sail with Lander under its shadow there opens out before us the noble confluence at Lokoja, where the Benué, the Niger’s mighty tributary, pours its mile-broad current into this great West African river. Next Lander passes between the jagged and stunted peaks of the Nigretian Alps, and nearing Idda, sees its bold precipices of red sandstone rear themselves on the left bank, and admires the giant baobab trees, the clustered round-roofed huts, and the busy throngs of Igara people passing to and fro from the riverside. But our explorer has vowed to follow the great Niger to its outflow, and we are still some 280 miles from the sea.
So Lander passes on in his boats, and nearing Asaba--now the seat of English government on the river--he notes that the native houses are now all of rectangular shape, and the people of Eboe type, and soon he is at Abo, and the tidal waters are recognized just as the ruffians of the Brass slaving fleet rush upon him and--capsizing his craft--Lander barely escapes with his life to find his brother drowning also. Rescued at last, John Lander is brought prisoner, together with Richard to the Brass mouth of the Niger, and their sufferings whilst waiting release and subsequently until landed at Fernando Po may well have made them dread the name of Brassmen. It may be that some day at Brass, or Akassa, English hands will raise a fitting and permanent memorial to this modest, uncultured and sterling character, who solved for all mankind the greatest geographical problem of his time, and opened the door for European commerce and civilization into West Central Africa. It must not be forgotten that MacQueen had all along contended that the Niger would be found to issue into the Atlantic through the swamps of the Bights of Benin and Biafra, nor are the reasons now obscure that account for that long hiding of geographical truth in the Gulf of Guinea. The Niger Delta is one covering 14,000 square miles; the Delta rivers creep into the sea almost unperceived through the low-level mangrove swamp; the whole region reeks with fevers and dysentery, and at the time of Lander’s discovery the only trade to be done in that “God-forgotten Guinea” was the slave-trade. Such white men as ventured to the Delta, therefore, were bent on secrecy rather than on discovery; and this had been the state of things for centuries. No wonder that the Niger had been a mystery, but it was a mystery no more.
The next step for its exploration was taken by Liverpool. Macgregor Laird raised a large fund among his merchant friends on the exchange, and added thereto a large part of his own fortune, built and equipped two steamships--the _Quorra_ and _Alburka_--and (with but little aid from the Government) took charge personally of this bold expedition, and in 1832 sailed for the Niger. Now, look at these banks forty feet at least above the river level, and remember that for three to four months of the year the villages lining them are simply floating in the vast waste of the Niger inundations. Mr. Laird found by a bitter experience that it was all very well to steam up the Niger when the stream was at flood, but when your crew were all down with fever and the river began to fall at the rate of a foot per day, the least accident--such as the stranding of the little _Quorra_--locked you up bag and baggage for a whole twelve months, and brought you face to face with terrible dangers. The mortality on board the steamers was awful, but Laird kept the expedition well in hand; he explored a great part of the upper middle Niger, a considerable distance up the Benué, and established the first English trading factories, 350 miles from the mouth of the Niger, ere his return to Liverpool. Like all other travellers who have seen the Benué, Laird was greatly impressed with the volume and purity of its waters, the beauty of its landscape on either bank, and the rich promise of development in its already quickened commerce. Look at the woodland beauty at Ribago, for instance; or the fine cultivated plain at Yola; and the impressive rock-fortress at Imaha. And see these fine Hausa peoples who inhabit the Sokoto and Bornu countries of the inter-riverine plateau. They are an ancient race, grave and industrious, of fine physique and highly intellectual phrenological type.
Centuries ago Macrisi--the Egyptian historian--told of their gourd-ferries, and the world laughed at such a “traveller’s tale”; but here you see them for yourselves. Centuries ago men wrote of the vast city of Timbuktu, but what is Timbuktu to Kano, the Hausa capital? Look at this wall surrounding Sokoto City, and think of the wall of Kano being as high as that and fifteen miles round! The Fulah aristocracy live at Sokoto, and their Sultan bears spiritual rule over the greater part of Hausaland; his temporal power is no myth, either, for in 1891 he raised an army of 40,000 men--half of whom were cavalry--under the eyes of Monteil. But the crumbling houses of Sokoto tell their own tale of a city that has long passed its zenith, and like Timbuktu, whose population has fallen from 200,000 to 7,000, like Katsena, whose population has fallen from 100,000 to 6,000, so Sokoto is daily yielding its temporal sceptre to Kano, the city of markets and manufactures, the centre of literature as well as of prosperous agriculture, the starting-point of the Soudan caravans, the central slave market, cloth market, metal market and the busy focus of all industries. See the great market square in which 30,000 people assemble for commercial exchange every week; these fourteen gates, through which the hosts of organized caravans are ever issuing, most of them 600 or 800 strong at the very least, and twenty of which go every year to Salaga for Kola-nut alone! Think of the Mecca pilgrims who all assembled here to form their great cavalcades yearly; of the 60,000 artificers and cultivators living in this Kano, with its enclosed fields of rich crops, its leather factories, shoe and sandal factories, dyeing works, cotton spinning and weaving, basket making, brass manufacture and ornamentation, etc. And remember that, thanks to our English chartered companies, this Kano, and these fine Hausa people--whose language has long been the key-tongue of all trade in Central Africa--are brought securely under the flag and influence of Great Britain. It is, from our point of view, a drawback that Kano lies at an unhealthy level, and its people defy every sanitary decency in their abbatoir and cemetery arrangements, but that is their way of being happy. Katsena is much more salubrious, having 1,500 feet of elevation.
Ere long, under British tutelage, and freed from dread of the Fulah slave-raider, the rascal who raids his own people for the mere joy of it, freed from this curse, the Hausa States will rise to preëminence through the aptitude and capacity for discipline inherent in that virile people.
I must pass over Bornu and its great chief city of Kuka, but would like to dwell for a moment on the deeply interesting fact that here--in the Chartered State of British Nigretia--we tread upon the dust of empires. At the time of our Heptarchy this very Bornu was the seat of a Negro empire covering a million and a half square miles, and extending from the Niger to the Nile. And Sokoto and Gandu--our Treaty states--formed but part of the Negro empire of Songhay, having its capital at Gogo on the Niger, and extending westward and northward as far as the Atlantic and Morocco.
THE AMAZON
JOSEPH JONES
The main stream of the Amazon is about 4,000 miles long--long enough that is to go in a circle twice round the British Isles, or 600 miles longer than the voyage from Liverpool to New York. For the lowest 250 miles of its course it is fifty miles wide, or if the Island of Marajo in its mouth be regarded as a huge sand bank, which is what it really is, then it is 200 miles wide at its mouth. In other words, one might take the whole of Scotland, push it into the mouth of this river and leave only a small piece projecting. The Amazon has nineteen very large tributaries, each of which is really a gigantic river in itself, and through these tributaries it is connected with the Orinoco and the River Plata. The Amazon rises near the west coast of South America, about sixty miles from Lima in Peru, and runs into the Atlantic, traversing nearly the whole width of the widest part of South America in its course. Its depth in places is twenty fathoms or 120 feet. It drains an area nearly the size of all Europe, and is the largest body of fresh water in the world. Its average speed of flow is two and a half miles per hour. Hence in going up-stream a boat hugs the bank to avoid the current, whilst in descending it sails in mid-stream in order to obtain full advantage of the same. As may be guessed, progress is quicker down-stream than up. The influence of its flow can be felt 150 miles from the shore. On one occasion the mess-room steward filled the filter direct from the sea when the ship was long out of sight of land, yet the water was only very slightly brackish. The inland navigation of the Amazon and its branches extends over 20,000 miles. The name is supposed to be derived from “Amassona,” the Indian word for “boat-destroyer,” on account of the tidal wave which rages in the channel to the north of the Island of Marajo, and on account of which boats enter by the south channel.
The river is high at the end of the rainy season and low after the dry season, but even at low river the ship in which I sailed, an ocean-going steamer, experienced no difficulty in sailing as far as Manâos. The difference in level is a matter of thirty feet, so that whereas in August you step out of a small boat on to the landing-stage, in October, when the river is about at its lowest, you have to walk on planks, from the boat to the foot of the landing-stage, mount this by a ladder and go ashore.
Being so near the equator, the Amazon is in a warm district. In the coolest part of the ship the temperature used to rise to 84° Fahrenheit in the afternoon, whilst in the sun 120° Fahrenheit was registered, and some of the pitch in the seams of the deck was melted. This was when ascending the river. There is a ten knot breeze from the sea which makes it cooler on returning, but on the inward journey when travelling with the wind and at practically the same speed, one is of course in a dead calm and uncomfortably hot. The river water itself at 6 A. M., was always between 88° Fahrenheit and 89° Fahrenheit.
Besides steamers the Amazon is navigated by battalongs, wooden craft, about twelve yards in length, covered with an awning of palm branches, which come from Peru and elsewhere with native produce, are manned by Indians who live aboard, and which take two months to get back home from Manâos against the stream. Smaller boats are driven by square sails of blue and white cotton, which bear traces of Manchester origin, and there are also native canoes propelled by paddles.
The Indians fish in an interesting manner by means of bow and arrow, with a line attached to the arrow. If they can get a couple of arrows firmly shot in they can usually haul in a river turtle or other large fish. There is a large fish with red flesh which serves the people in some parts instead of beef (cattle being dear). Thus they don’t fulfil the old definition of an angler as “a worm at one end and a fool at the other.” River turtle when caught are laid on their backs, in which position they are helpless, and one on board the ship laid eighty-six eggs at one break whilst in this position. The eggs are spherical, covered with a flexible limy shell, and resemble in appearance a small tennis-ball. They are a treat out there, where eggs are very scarce. The flesh of this kind of turtle is rather tough and not unlike pork.
A great variety of animal life is to be found, including mosquitoes, cockroaches, moths, butterflies, alligators, snakes, tarantulas, centipedes, and grasshoppers.
The savage people, who live some little distance from the river, are of about our average height and build, walnut-coloured, with long straight jet-black hair. In war they fight with bamboo-headed spears and poisoned arrows, the latter propelled by a powerful bow seven feet long. The arrow-heads, of bone, are dipped in snake venom and inflict a mortal wound. The venom is said to be procured by boiling snakes’ heads to extract it from the glands and evaporating the solution to almost dryness. Right inland the tribes often have battles, and the victors kill the women and children of the vanquished. They have a horrible habit of cutting off the heads of girls, skinning them, and curing the skin in such a way that it shrinks, but retains its colour and texture, when they stuff it, producing a head the size of one’s fist, but perfect in shape. They sell them at from £12 to £30 to Europeans, who ought to know better than to buy them.
The civilized people speak the Portuguese language and are of European habits. They are more polite than the British, though this is noticeable by their habits being different from ours rather than by being better. For instance, I have seen a first-class passenger expectorate on the saloon floor when at dinner and never blush, but he would think himself dreadfully impolite if he wore his hat in a restaurant. One is impelled to Max O’Rell’s conclusion that “one nation is not better or worse than another. One nation is different from another, that is all.”
The money is mostly paper, and there is no paper legal tender less than the milreis (2s. 3d. nominally, actually about 7d.). In Pará small change is given in tram tickets.
The vegetable kingdom numbers 17,000 species and is a veritable fairy-land. Orchids, which with us are so highly prized, are much cheaper there. Very many varieties grow quite wild and are little esteemed. I know one man who had an orange tree in his garden and considered it a nuisance. It crowded out some valuable exotic orchids. He would willingly have let any one take it away but no one would have it. The whole country resembles a gigantic greenhouse, and it is not without a touch of annoyance that a Briton sees beautiful palms and other trees wasted on people who do not appreciate them when they would be welcome at home. The hanging roots or tendrils, which grow downwards from the branches until they take root in the ground, are quite strange to us, and they offer great resistance to path-making. The most important tree is the india rubber, _Herveia Brasilensis_, which is a large tree, and entirely different from the _Ficus elasticus_, which is commonly called “india rubber” here and grown in rooms. The raw rubber is obtained by incising the bark and collecting the “milk” in a can. A paddle is dipped into this and the milk adhering to it smoked over some burning nuts. This is done with successive dippings until a piece the size of a ham is on the paddle, when a slit is made in the side and the paddle withdrawn. It is quite possible that the wily native may insert a pebble, when he has withdrawn the paddle, since rubber is sold by weight. The best quality is that obtained from the Island of Marajo and known as Island Rubber. This is said to be because a species of nut grows there the smoke of which cures the rubber better than any other kind of smoke. It is said that every kind of rubber requires some admixture of the Pará variety to make it useful in commerce. Many of the rubber cutters live in shanties on the river’s edge and keep a canoe moored at the door. More inland the poorer classes live in mud huts built on a framework of light wood. Some of these when whitewashed make very presentable houses, as seen in the view of the main street of Parentins, where the post-office and neighbouring buildings are all of this sort. The cathedrals are generally handsome buildings, and the post-office at Pará is a pretty structure.
The shops are open fronted and usually have no windows, so that at a short distance one cannot tell of what kind they are unless the goods are displayed outside.
The streets are peculiarly named, for instance “Fifteenth of November Square” (date of foundation of the Republic), “Dr. Guimarez Lane,” and so on.
The cities bear very evident traces of newness. You may see a public square enclosing a tract of virgin soil and except that the palms are planted in straight rows all the vegetation is natural. There are handsome walnut counters in whitewashed stores and burglar-proof safes inside offices which you could demolish with your foot.