Chapter 7

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.

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."

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.