A Mission to Gelele: King of Dahome (Complete)

This fertile soil, which enjoys a perpetual spring, is considered a strong prison, as the land of spectres, the seat of disease, and the mansion of death.
Said of Bengal by its Moslem conquerors.
A Ilha Formosa, the lovely island of Fernando Po, has, like most beauties, two different, indeed two opposite, aspects.
About Christmas time she is in a state deeper than rest,—
A kind of sleepy Venus seemed Dudu.
Everything, in fact, appears enwrapped in the rapture of repose. As the ship glides from the rolling, blustering Bights into that wonderfully still water, men come on deck feeling they know not what; çela porte à l’amour, as the typical Frenchman remarks. The oil-like swell is too lazy to break upon the silent shore, the wind has hardly enough energy to sigh, the tallest trees nod and bend drowsily downwards, even the grass is, from idleness, averse to wave: the sluggish clouds bask in the soft light of the sky, while the veiled sun seems in no hurry to run his course. Here no one would dream, as does our modern poet, of calling nature “sternly fair.” If such be the day, conceive the cloister-like stillness of a night spent in the bosom of Clarence Cove. Briefly, Fernando Po, in the dry weather, is a Castle of Indolence, a Land of the Lotophagi, a City of the Living-Dead.
But as I saw her in November, 1863, and as she had been for the six months preceding, the charmer was not to be recognised by that portrait. A change had come over her Madonna-like face—as is sometimes witnessed in the “human organism.” The rainy season had set in earlier than usual; it had opened in May, and in November it was not ended. A heavy arch of nimbus, either from the north-east or the north-west, gathered like a frown on the forehead of the dull grey firmament. Presently the storm came down, raving like a jealous wife. In a few moments it burst with a flood of tears, a sheet of “solid water,” rent and blown about by raging, roaring gusts, that seemed to hurry from every quarter in the very ecstasy of passion. Baleful gleams of red thready lightning flashed like the glances of fury in weeping eyes, and deafening peals of thunder crashed overhead, not with the steady rumble of a European tempest, but sharp, sudden, and incisive as claps of feminine objurgation between fits of sobbing. These lively scenes were enacted during half the day, and often throughout the night: they passed off in lady-like sulks, a windless fog or a brown-blue veil of cloud settling hopelessly over the face of heaven and earth, till the unappeased elements gathered strength for a fresh outburst.
Amidst this caprice, these coquetries of the “Beautiful Island,” man found it hard to live, but uncommonly easy to die. Presently all that was altered, and the history of the metamorphosis deserves, I think, to be recorded.
The shrew was tamed by an inch and a half of barometric altitude. The dictum of the learned Dr. Waitz, the Anthropologist, no longer holds good.
When I first landed on this island (September, 1861), Sta. Isabel, née Clarence, the lowland town and harbour, was the only locality inhabited by the new Spanish colony. Pallid men were to be seen sitting or lolling languid in their verandahs, and occasionally crawling about the grass-grown streets, each with a cigarette hanging to his lower lip. They persistently disappeared in the dry season, whilst their example was followed by the coloured “liberateds” and the colonists during the “balance” of the year. H.B.M.’s Consulate is situated unpleasantly near a military hospital: breakfast and dinner were frequently enlivened by the spectacle of a something covered with a blanket being carried in, and after due time a something within a deal box being borne out on four ghastly men’s shoulders. And strangers fled the place like a pestilence: sailors even from the monotonous “south coast,” felt the ennui of Fernando Po to be deadly—grave-like.
At length Yellow Fever, the gift of the “Grand Bonny,” which was well-nigh depopulated, stalked over the main in March, 1862, and in two months he swept off 78 out of a grand total of 250 white men.
The “Beautiful Island” was now going too far. Seeing that the fever did not abate, H.E. the Governor de la Gandara determined to try the effects of altitude. A kind of “quartelillo”—infirmerie or baraque—was hastily run up in twelve days, beginning from June 22nd, 1862, by M. Tejero, Commandent of Military Engineers. The site, a kind of shelf over the village of Basile, about 400 metres above sea-level, received the name of Sta. Cecilia. On the day after its completion, July 6th, nineteen pénitentiaires, or political prisoners, the survivors of some thirty men that had died of yellow fever in the hulks, were transferred to the new quarters; two were lost by attacks of the same disease contracted on the seaboard, the rest of those condemned to travaux forcés kept their health, and were returned to their homes in November, 1862.
This old baraque is now nearly always empty, being converted into a kind of lodging-house. Its dimensions are 11·50 mètres long, by 6 broad, and raised on piles 1·50 high; the rooms are three in number, one large, of 6 metres by 4·25, and the other two of 4·25 mètres by 3.
Seeing the excellent result of that experiment, H.E. Sr. D. Lopez de Ayllon, the present Governor, to whom these pages are respectfully inscribed, determined to increase operations. Major Osorio, of the Engineers, was directed to build amaison caserne, intended to accommodate white soldiers not wanted for duty at Sta. Isabel. It was begun March 22nd, finished September 5th, and opened November 30th, 1863. The rez de chaussée lodges forty men, the second story as many more, whilst the first stage has rooms for the Governor, his aide-de-camp, and four officers. Besides these two lumber houses, there are tolerable stables for horses and mules, good roads well bridged, and a channel of mountain water, which the white soldiers, who can work in the sun with the thinnest of caps, have derived from the upper levels. About thirty men were sent here. Their number has varied but little. During the five months from December, 1863, to April, 1864, though there have been sporadic local cases of simple intermittent fever—March, 1864, shows only one—and though dangerous diseases have been brought up from the lowlands, not a death has occurred.
Thus, then, the first sanitarium in Western Africa owes its existence to the Spanish Colony, that dates only from the middle of 1859. As far back as 1848, the late Captain Wm. Allen and Dr. Thompson, of the Niger Expedition, proposed a sanitary settlement at Victoria, on the seaboard below the Camaroons Mountain, a site far superior to Fernando Po. Since their time, the measure has been constantly advocated by the late Mr. M. Laird. Eppur non si muove—Britannia. She allows her “sentimental squadron” to droop and to die without opposing the least obstacle between it and climate. A few thousands spent at Camaroons or at Fernando Po would, calculating merely the market value of seamen’s lives, repay themselves in as many years. Yet not a word from the Great Mother!
When I compare St. Louis of Senegal with Sierra Leone, or Lagos with Fernando Po, it is my conviction that a temporary something is going wrong with the popular constitution at home. If not, whence this want of energy, this new-born apathy? Dr. Watson assures us that disease in England has now assumed an asthenic and adynamic type. The French said of us in the Crimea that Jean Boule had shattered his nerves with too much tea. The Registrar-General suggests the filthy malaria of the overcrowded hodiernal English town as the fomes malorum. The vulgar opinion is, that since the days of the cholera the Englishman (physical) has become a different being from his prototype of those fighting times when dinner-pills were necessary. And we all know that
C’est la constipation que rend l’homme rigoureux.
Whatever the cause may be, an Englishman’s lot is at present not enviable, and his children have a Herculean task “cut and dry” before them.
Nothing can be more genial and healthful than the place where I am writing these lines, the frame or plank-house built by D. Pellon, of the Woods and Forests, now absent on private affairs in Spain. The aneroid shows 29 instead of 30·1-30·4 inches, and the altitude does not exceed 800 feet. Yet after sunrise the thermometer (F.) often stands at 68°, reddening the hands and cheeks of the white man. We can take exercise mentally and bodily without that burst of perspiration which follows every movement in the lowlands, and we can repose without the sensation which the “Beebee” in India defined as “feeling like a boiled cabbage.” The view from the balcony facing north is charming. On the right are the remnants of a palm orchard; to the left, an avenue of bananas leads to a clump of tropical forest; and on both sides tumbles adown the basaltic rocks and stones a rivulet of pure cold mountain water—most delightful of baths—over which the birds sing loudly through the livelong day. In front is a narrow ledge of cleared ground bearing rose-trees two years old and fifteen feet high, a pair of coffee shrubs, bowed with scarlet berries, sundry cotton plants, by no means despicable, and a cacao, showing what the island would have been but for the curse of free labour. Beyond the immediate foreground there is a slope, hollowed in the centre, and densely covered with leek-green and yellow-green grasses of the Holcus kind now finding favour in England, and even here fragrant, when cut, as northern hay. The drop is sufficiently abrupt below to fall without imperceptible gradation into the rolling plain, thick and dark with domed and white-boled trees, which separate the mountain from the Ethiopic main. The white houses of Sta. Isabel glisten brightly on the marge; beyond it the milky-blue expanse of streaked waters stretches to the bent bow of the horizon; and on the right towers, in solitary majesty, a pyramid of Nature’s handiwork, “Mongo ma Lobah,” the Mount of Heaven, now capped with indistinct cloud, then gemmed with snow, and reflecting from its golden head the gorgeous tropical sunshine; whilst over all of earth and sea and sky there is that halo of atmosphere which is to landscape what the light of youth is to human loveliness.
And as night first glooms in the East, the view borrows fresh beauties from indistinctness. The varied tints make way for the different shades of the same colour that mark the several distances, and hardly can the eye distinguish in the offing land from sea. Broken lines of mist-rack rise amongst the trees of the basal plain, following the course of some streamlet, like a string of giant birds flushed from their roosts. The moon sleeps sweetly upon the rolling banks of foliage, and from under the shadowing trees issue weird fantastic figures, set off by the emerald light above. In the growing silence the tinkle of the two rivulets becomes an audible bass, the treble being the merry cricket and the frog praying lustily for rain, whilst the palms whisper mysterious things in their hoarse baritone. The stars shine bright, twinkling as if frost were in the air; we have eliminated the thick stratum of atmosphere that overhangs the lowlands, and behind us, in shadowy grandeur, neither blue nor brown nor pink, but with a blending of the three, and sometimes enwrapped in snowy woolpack so dense as to appear solid against the deep azure, the Pico Santa Isabel, the highest crater in the island, rises softly detached from the cirrus-flecked nocturnal sky.
Life, as an American missionary remarked, is somewhat primitive at Buena Vista, but it is not the less pleasant. An hour of work in my garden at sunrise and sunset, when the scenery is equally beautiful, hard reading during the day, and after dark a pipe and a new book of travels, this is the “fallentis semita vitæ” which makes one shudder before plunging once more into the cold and swirling waters of society—of civilization. My “n*****s” are, as Krumen should be, employed all the day long in clearing, cutting, and planting—it is quite the counterpart of a landowner’s existence in the Southern States. Nothing will prevent them calling themselves my “children,” that is to say, my slaves; and indeed no white man who has lived long in the outer tropics can prevent feeling that he is pro tempore the lord, the master, and the proprietor of the black humanity placed under him. It is true that the fellows have no overseer, consequently there is no whip; punishment resolves itself into retrenching rum and tobacco; moreover, they come and go as they please. But if a little “moral influence” were not applied to their lives, they would be dozing or quarrelling all day in their quarters, and twanging a native guitar half the night, much to their own discomfort and more to their owner’s. Consequently I keep them to their work.
At certain hours the bugle-call from Santa Cecilia intimates that all about me is not savagery. And below where the smoke rises “a-twisten blue” from the dense plantation of palms, lies a rich study for an ethnologist—Basile, the Bubé village. No white man has lived long enough amongst this exceptional race of Fernandians to describe them minutely, and, as a rule, they have been grossly and unjustly abused. A few lines will show the peculiarities which distinguish them from other African tribes.
The Bubé—who, as may be proved by language, is an aborigine of the mainland—has forgotten his origin, and he wisely gives himself no trouble about it. If you ask him whence he comes, he replies “from his mother”; whither he goes, and he answers “to Drikhatta ra Busala ’be if a bad man,” and “to Lubakko ’pwa (the sky) if he has been a good Bubé.” He has a conception of and a name for the Creator, Rupe or Erupe, but he does not perplex himself with questions of essence and attribute, personality and visibility. Perhaps in this point too he shows good sense. He is also, you may be sure, not without an evil principle, Busala ’be, who acts as it were chief of police.
Coming down from the things of heaven to those of earth, the Fernandian is “aristocratic,” an out-and-out conservative; no oldest Tory of the old school can pretend to rival him. But in many points his attachment to ancient ways results not from prejudice, but from a tradition founded upon sound instinct. He will not live near the sea for fear of being kidnapped, also because the over-soft air effeminates his frame. He refuses to build higher up the mountains than 2000 to 3000 feet, as his staff of life, the palm and the plantain, will not flourish in the raw air and in the rugged ground. He confines himself therefore to the exact zone in which the medical geographer of the present age would place him—above the fatal fever level, and below the line of dysentery and pneumonia. His farm is at a distance from his cottage, to prevent domestic animals finding their way into it; his yam fields, which supply the finest crops, are as pretty and as neatly kept as vineyards in Burgundy, and he makes the best “topi” or palm toddy in Western Africa. His habitation is a mere shed without walls: he is a Spartan in these matters. Nothing will persuade him to wear, beyond the absolute requirements of decency, anything warmer than a thin coat of palm oil: near the summit of the mountain, 10,000 feet above sea-level, I have offered him a blanket, and he has preferred the fire. His only remarkable, somewhat “fashionable”-looking article of dress is an extensive wicker hat covered with a monkey skin, but this is useful to prevent tree snakes falling upon his head. He insists upon his wife preserving the same toilette, minus the hat—oh, how wise! If she does not come up to his beau ideal of fidelity, he cuts off, first her left hand, then her right, lastly, her throat; a very just sequence. He is not a slave nor will he keep slaves; he holds them to be a vanity, and justly, because he can work for himself. He is no idler; after labouring at his farm, he will toil for days to shoot a monkey, a “philantomba” (alias “fritamba”), or a flying squirrel. Besides being a sportsman, he has his manly games, and I should not advise every one to tackle him with quarter-staff; hisalpenstock is a powerful and a well-wielded weapon. Though so highly conservative, he is not, as some might imagine, greatly destitute of intelligence: he pronounces our harsh and difficult English less incorrectly that any West African tribe, including the Sierra Leonite. Brightest of all is his moral character: you may safely deposit rum and tobacco—that is to say, gold and silver—in his street, and he will pay his debt as surely as the Bank of England. And what caps his worldly wisdom, is his perfect and perpetual suspiciousness. He never will tell you his name, he never receives you as a friend, he never trusts you, even when you bring gifts; he will turn out armed if you enter his village at an unseasonable hour, and if you are fond of collecting vocabularies, may the god of speech direct you! The fact is, that the plunderings and the kidnappings of bygone days are burned into his memory: he knows that such things have been, and he knows not when they may again be. So he confines himself to the society of his native hamlet, and he makes no other intimacies, even with the fellowmen whose village smoke he sees curling up from the neighbouring dell.