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Title: Tropical Africa
Author: Henry Drummond
Release date: October 15, 2024 [eBook #74587]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Columbian Publishing Co
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROPICAL AFRICA ***
[Transcriber's note: This book contains a few oddly spelled words,
e.g. "poinded", which may have been intended as "impounded". This,
and others, have been left as printed.]
[Frontispiece: Henry Drummond]
TROPICAL AFRICA
BY
HENRY DRUMMOND, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
AUTHOR OF "NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD."
NEW YORK
JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER
1890
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA: THE RIVERS ZAMBESI AND SHIRE
CHAPTER II.
THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY: LAKES SHIRWA AND NYASSA
CHAPTER III.
THE ASPECT OF THE HEART OF AFRICA: THE COUNTRY AND PEOPLE
CHAPTER IV.
THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA: ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE
CHAPTER V.
WANDERINGS ON THE NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU: A TRAVELLER'S DIARY
CHAPTER VI.
THE WHITE ANT: A THEORY
CHAPTER VII.
MIMICRY: THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS
CHAPTER VIII.
A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH
CHAPTER IX.
A POLITICAL WARNING
CHAPTER X.
A METEOROLOGICAL NOTE
PREFACE.
It is the genial tax of literature upon Travel that those who have
explored the regions of the uncivilised should open their bag of
wonders before the world and celebrate their return to clothing in
three or four volumes and a map. This exaction, in the nature of
things, must shortly abolish itself.
As a minor traveller, whose assets are few, I have struggled to evade
even this obligation, but having recently had to lecture on African
subjects to various learned and unlearned Societies in England and
America, it has been urged upon me that a few of the lecture-notes
thrown into popular form might be useful as a general sketch of East
Central Africa. Great books of travel have had their day. But small
books, with the larger features of a country lightly sketched, and
just enough of narrative to make you feel that you are really there,
have a function in helping the imagination of those who have not
breath enough to keep up with the great explorers.
The publication of "The White Ant" and "Mimicry" has been already
forestalled by one of the monthly magazines; and the "Geological
Sketch" is rescued, and duly dusted, from the archives of the British
Association. If the dust of science has been too freely shaken from
the other chapters, the scientific reader will overlook it for the
sake of an over-worked public which has infinite trouble in getting
itself mildly instructed and entertained without being disheartened
by the heavy pomp of technical expression.
If anything in a work of this class could pretend to a serious
purpose, I do not conceal that, in addition to the mere desire to
inform, a special reason exists just now for writing about Africa--a
reason so urgent that I excuse myself with difficulty for introducing
so grave a problem in so slight a setting. The reader who runs his
eye over the "Heart-Disease of Africa" will discover how great the
need is for arousing afresh that truer interest in the Dark Continent
which since Livingstone's time has almost died away. To many modern
travellers Africa is simply a country to be explored; to Livingstone
it was a land to be pitied and redeemed. And recent events on Lake
Nyassa have stirred a new desire in the hearts of those who care for
native Africa that "the open sore of the world" should have a last
and decisive treatment at the hands of England.
HENRY DRUMMOND.
TROPICAL AFRICA.
I
THE WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA.
THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE.
Three distinct Africas are known to the modern world--North Africa,
where men go for health; South Africa, where they go for money; and
Central Africa, where they go for adventure. The first, the old
Africa of Augustine and Carthage, every one knows from history; the
geography of the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, has
been taught us by two Universal Educators--War and the
Stock-Exchange; but our knowledge of the third, the Africa of
Livingstone and Stanley, is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look
upon our maps which tells how long this mysterious land has kept its
secret.
Into the heart of this mysterious Africa I wish to take you with me
now. And let me magnify my subject by saying at once that it is a
wonderful thing to see. It is a wonderful thing to start from the
civilization of Europe, pass up these mighty rivers, and work your
way into that unknown land--work your way alone, and on foot, mile
after mile, month after month, among strange birds and beasts and
plants and insects, meeting tribes which have no name, speaking
tongues which no man can interpret, till you have reached its secret
heart, and stood where white man has never trod before. It is a
wonderful thing to look at this weird world of human beings--half
animal half children, wholly savage and wholly heathen; and to turn
and come back again to civilization before the impressions have had
time to fade, and while the myriad problems of so strange a spectacle
are still seething in the mind. It is an education to see this
sight--an education in the meaning and history of man. To have been
here is to have lived before Menes. It is to have watched the dawn
of evolution. It is to have the great moral and social problems of
life, of anthropology, of ethnology, and even of theology, brought
home to the imagination in the most new and startling light.
On the longest day of a recent summer--midwinter therefore in the
tropics--I left London. A long railway run across France,
Switzerland, and Italy brings one in a day or two to the
Mediterranean. Crossing to Alexandria, the traveller strikes across
Egypt over the Nile, through the battlefield of Tel-el-Kebir, to the
Red Sea, steams down its sweltering length to Aden, tranships, and,
after three lifetimes of deplorable humiliation in the south-west
Monsoons, terminates his sufferings at Zanzibar.
Zanzibar is the focus of all East African exploration. No matter
where you are going in the interior, you must begin at Zanzibar.
Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in
its morals, this cesspool of wickedness is a fit capital for the Dark
Continent. But Zanzibar is Zanzibar simply because it is the only
apology for a town on the whole coast. An immense outfit is required
to penetrate this shopless and foodless land, and here only can the
traveller make up his caravan. The ivory and slave trades have made
caravaning a profession, and everything the explorer wants is to be
had in these bazaars, from a tin of sardines to a repeating rifle.
Here these black villains, the porters, the necessity and the despair
of travellers, the scum of old slave gangs, and the fugitives from
justice from every tribe, congregate for hire. And if there is one
thing on which African travellers are for once agreed, it is that for
laziness, ugliness, stupidness, and wickedness, these men are not to
be matched on any continent in the world. Their one strong point is
that they will engage themselves for the Victoria Nyanza or for the
Grand Tour of the Tanganyika with as little ado as a Chamounix guide
volunteers for the Jardin; but this singular avidity is mainly due to
the fact that each man cherishes the hope of running away at the
earliest opportunity. Were it only to avoid requiring to employ
these gentlemen, having them for one's sole company month after
month, seeing them transgress every commandment in turn before your
eyes--you yourself being powerless to check them except by a
wholesale breach of the sixth--it would be worth while to seek
another route into the heart of Africa.
But there is a much graver objection to the Zanzibar route to the
interior. Stanley started by this route on his search for
Livingstone, two white men with him; he came back without them.
Cameron set out by the same path to cross Africa with two companions;
before he got to Tanganyika he was alone. The Geographical Society's
late expedition, under Mr. Keith Johnstone, started from Zanzibar
with two Europeans; the hardy and accomplished leader fell within a
couple of months. These expeditions have all gone into the interior
by this one fatal way, and probably every second man, by fever or by
accident, has left his bones to bleach along the road. Hitherto
there has been no help for it. The great malarious coast-belt must
be crossed, and one had simply to take his life in his hands and go
through with it.
But now there is an alternative. There is a rival route into the
interior, which, though it is not without its dark places too, will
probably yet become the great highway from the East to Central
Africa. Let me briefly sketch it:
Africa, speaking generally, is a vast, ill-formed triangle. It has
no peninsulas; it has almost no islands or bays or fjords. But three
great inlets, three mighty rivers piercing it to the very heart, have
been allocated by a kind Nature, one to each of its solid sides. On
the north is the river of the past, flowing through Egypt, as Leigh
Hunt says, "like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream"; on
the west, the river of the future, the not less mysterious Congo; and
on the east the little known Zambesi.
The physical features of this great continent are easily grasped.
From the coast a low scorched plain, reeking with malaria, extends
inland in unbroken monotony for two or three hundred miles. This is
succeeded by mountains slowly rising into a plateau some 2000 or 3000
feet high; and this, at some hundreds of miles distance, forms the
pedestal for a second plateau, as high again. This last plateau,
4000 to 5000 feet high, may be said to occupy the whole of Central
Africa. It is only on the large scale, however, that these are to be
reckoned plateaux at all. When one is upon them he sees nothing but
mountains and valleys and plains of the ordinary type, covered for
the most part with forest.
I have said that Nature has supplied each side of Africa with one
great river. By going some hundreds of miles southward along the
coast from Zanzibar the traveller reaches the mouth of the Zambesi.
Livingstone sailed up this river once, and about a hundred miles from
its mouth discovered another river twisting away northwards among the
mountains. The great explorer was not the man to lose such a chance
of penetrating the interior. He followed this river up, and after
many wanderings found himself on the shores of a mighty lake. The
river is named the Shiré, and the lake--the existence of which was
quite unknown before, is Lake Nyassa. Lake Nyassa is 350 miles long;
so that, with the Zambesi, the Shiré, and this great lake, we have
the one thing required to open up East Central Africa--a water-route
to the interior. But this is not all. Two hundred and fifty miles
from the end of Lake Nyassa another lake of still nobler proportions
takes up the thread of communication. Lake Tanganyika is 450 miles
in length. Between the lakes stands a lofty plateau, cool, healthy,
accessible, and without any physical barrier to interrupt the
explorer's march. By this route the Victoria Nyanza and the Albert
Nyanza may be approached with less fatigue, less risk, and not less
speed, than by the overland trail from Zanzibar. At one point also,
along this line, one is within a short march of that other great
route which must ever be regarded as the trunk-line of the African
continent. The watershed of the _Congo_ lies on this
Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau. This is the stupendous natural highway on
which so much of the future of East Central Africa must yet depend.
Ten days' languid steaming from Zanzibar brings the traveller to the
Zambesi mouth. The bar here has an evil reputation, and the port is
fixed on a little river which flows into the Indian Ocean slightly to
the north, but the upper reaches of which almost join the Zambesi at
some distance inland. This port is the Portuguese settlement of
Quilimane, and here I said good-bye to the steamer and to
civilization. Some distance in the interior stands a solitary
pioneer Mission station of the Established Church of Scotland, and
still farther in, on Lake Nyassa, another outpost of a sister church.
My route led past both these stations, and I had the good fortune to
pick up on the way two or three young fellow-countrymen who were
going up to relieve the mission staff. For the latter part of my
journey I was quite alone. All African work, as a rule, is done
single-handed. It is not always easy to find a companion for such a
project, and the climate is so pestilential that when two go, you and
your friend are simply nursing each other time about, and the
expedition never gets on. On the whole, however, the solitary course
is not to be commended. An unutterable loneliness comes over one at
times in the great still forests, and there is a stage in African
fever--and every one must have fever--when the watchful hand of a
friend may make the difference between life and death.
After leaving Quilimane, the first week of our journey up the Qua-qua
was one long picnic. We had two small row-boats, the sterns covered
with a sun-proof awning, and under these we basked, and talked, and
read and prospected, from dawn to sunset. Each boat was paddled by
seven or eight natives--muscular heathens, whose sole dress was a
pocket-handkerchief, a little palm oil, and a few mosquitoes. Except
at first the river was only a few yards broad, and changed in
character and novelty every hour. Now it ran through a grove of
cocoa-nut palms--the most wonderful and beautiful tree of the
tropics. Now its sullen current oozed through a fœtid swamp of
mangroves--the home of the crocodile and the hippopotamus, whose
slimy bodies wallowed into the pools with a splash as our boats sped
past. Again the banks became green and graceful, the long plumed
grasses bending to the stream, and the whole a living aviary of
birds--the white ibis and the gaunt fish eagle, and the exquisite
blue and scarlet kingfisher watching its prey from the overhanging
boughs. The businesslike air of this last bird is almost comical,
and somehow sits ill on a creature of such gorgeous beauty. One
expects him to flutter away before the approach of so material a
thing as a boat, display his fairy plumage in a few airy movements,
and melt away in the sunshine. But there he sits, stolid and
impassive, and though the spray of the paddles almost dashes in his
face, the intent eyes never move, and he refuses to acknowledge the
intruder by so much as a glance. His larger ally, the black and
white spotted kingfisher, if less beautiful, is much more energetic,
and darts about the bank incessantly, coquetting with the boat from
reach to reach, and seldom allowing an inspection close enough to
take in the details of his piebald coat.
One interests oneself in these things more particularly because there
is nothing at first especially striking about the river scenery
itself. Ten or twenty feet of bank cuts off the view on either side,
and large and varied features are wanting. The banks are lined with
the densest jungle of mangroves and aquatic grasses, while creepers
of a hundred kinds struggle for life among the interlacing stems. We
saw crocodiles here in such numbers that count was very soon lost.
They were of all sizes, from the baby specimen which one might take
home in a bottle to the enormous bullet-proof brute the size of an
81-ton gun. These revolting animals take their siesta in the heat of
the day, lying prone upon the bank, with their wedge-shaped heads
directed towards the water. When disturbed they scuttle into the
river with a wriggling movement, the precipitancy of which defies the
power of sight. The adjustment of the adult crocodile to its
environment in the matter of color is quite remarkable. The younger
forms are lighter yellow, and more easily discoverable, but it takes
the careful use of a good pair of eyes to distinguish in the gnarled
slime-covered log lying among the rotting stumps the living form of
the mature specimen. Between the African crocodiles and the
alligators there is the slightest possible external difference;
although the longer head, the arrangement of scales, the fringed feet
with their webbed toes, the uniform teeth, and the protrusion of the
large canine, distinguish them from their American allies.
Many of the ibises I shot as we moved along, for food for the men,
who, like all Africans, will do anything for flesh in whatever form.
For ourselves, we lived upon emaciated fowls and tinned meats,
cooking them at a fire on the bank when the boat stopped. Eggs are
never eaten by the natives, but always set; although, if you offer to
buy them, the natives will bring you a dozen from a sitting hen,
which they assure you were laid that very morning. In the interior,
on many occasions afterwards, these protestations were tested, and
always proved false. One time, when nearly famished and far from
camp, I was brought a few eggs which a chief himself guaranteed had
that very hour been laid. With sincere hope that he might be right,
but with much misgiving, I ordered the two freshest looking to be
boiled. With the despair of a starving man I opened them. They were
cock and hen.
Breakfast and luncheon and dinner are all the same in Africa. There
is no beef, nor mutton, nor bread, nor flour, nor sugar, nor salt,
nor anything whatever, except an occasional fowl, which an Englishman
can eat. Hence the enormous outfit which he must carry with him. No
one has any idea of what can be had in tins till he camps out abroad.
Every conceivable digestible and indigestible is to be had tinned,
every form of fish, flesh, fowl, and game, every species of
vegetable, and fruit, every soup, sweet, and _entrée_; but after two
or three months of this sort of thing you learn that this tempting
semblance of variety is a gigantic imposition. The sole difference
between these various articles lies, like the Rhine wines, in the
label. Plum pudding or kippered herring taste just the same.
Whether you begin dinner with tinned calves-foot jelly or end with
tinned salmon makes no difference; and after six months it is only by
a slight feeling of hardness that you do not swallow the tins
themselves.
At the end of a too short week we left our boats behind. Engaging an
army of shy natives at a few huts near the bank, we struck across a
low neck of land, and after an hour's walk found ourselves suddenly
on the banks of the Zambesi. A solitary bungalow was in sight, and
opposite it the little steamer of the African Lakes Company, which
was to take us up the Shiré. There is more in the association,
perhaps, than in the landscape, to strike one as he first furrows the
waters of this virgin river. We are fifty miles from its mouth, the
mile-wide water shallow and brown, the low sandy banks fringed with
alligators and wild birds. The great deltoid plain, yellow with
sun-tanned reeds and sparsely covered with trees, stretches on every
side; the sun is blistering hot; the sky, as it will be for months, a
monotonous dome of blue--not a frank bright blue like the Canadian
sky, but a veiled blue, a suspicious and malarious blue, partly due
to the perpetual heat haze and partly to the imagination, for the
Zambesi is no friend to the European, and this whole region is heavy
with depressing memories.
This impression, perhaps, was heightened by the fact that we were to
spend that night within a few yards of the place where Mrs.
Livingstone died. Late in the afternoon we reached the spot--a low
ruined hut a hundred yards from the river's bank, with a broad
verandah shading its crumbling walls. A grass-grown path straggled
to the doorway, and the fresh print of a hippopotamus told how
neglected the spot is now. Pushing the door open, we found ourselves
in a long dark room, its mud floor broken into fragments, and remains
of native fires betraying its latest occupants. Turning to the
right, we entered a smaller chamber, the walls bare and stained, with
two glassless windows facing the river. The evening sun setting over
the far-off Morumballa mountains, filled the room with its soft glow,
and took our thoughts back to that Sunday evening twenty years ago,
when in this same bedroom, at this same hour, Livingstone knelt over
his dying wife, and witnessed the great sunset of his life.
Under a huge baobab tree--a miracle of vegetable vitality and
luxuriance--stands Mrs. Livingstone's grave. The picture in
Livingstone's book represents the place as well kept and surrounded
with neatly-planted trees. But now it is an utter wilderness, matted
with jungle grass and trodden by the beasts of the forest; and as I
looked at the forsaken mound and contrasted it with her husband's
tomb in Westminster Abbey, I thought perhaps the woman's love which
brought her to a spot like this might be not less worthy of
immortality.
The Zambesi is the great river of Eastern Africa, and, after the
Congo, the Nile, and the Niger, the most important on the continent.
Rising in the far interior among the marshes of Lake Dilolo, and,
gathering volume from the streams which flow from the high lands
connecting the north of Lake Nyassa with Inner Angola, it curves
across the country for over a thousand miles like an attenuated
letter S, and before its four great mouths empty the far-travelled
waters into the Indian Ocean, drains an area of more than half a
million square miles. As it cuts its way down the successive steps
of the central plateaux its usually placid current is interrupted by
rapids, narrows, cascades, and cataracts, corresponding to the
plateau edges, so that like all the rivers of Africa it is only
navigable in stretches of one or two hundred miles at a time. From
the coast the Zambesi might be stemmed by steam-power to the rapids
of Kebrabasa; and from above that point intermittently, as far as the
impassable barrier of the Victoria Falls. Above this, for some
distance, again follow rapids and waterfalls, but these are at length
succeeded by an unbroken chain of tributaries which together form an
inland waterway of a thousand miles in length. The broad lands along
the banks of this noble river are subject to annual inundations like
the region of the Nile, and hence their agricultural possibilities
are unlimited. On the lower Zambesi, indigo, the orchila weed, and
caluraba-root abound, and oil-seeds and sugar-cane could be produced
in quantity to supply the whole of Europe. At present, owing to
apathy and indifferent government, these magnificent resources are
almost wholly undeveloped.
Next afternoon our little vessel left the Zambesi in its wake and
struck up a fine lake-like expansion to the north, which represents
the mouth of the Shiré. Narrower and deeper, the tributary is a
better stream for navigation than the Zambesi. The scenery also is
really fine, especially as one nears the mountains of the plateau,
and the strange peoples and animals along the banks occupy the mind
with perpetual interests. The hippopotami, prowling round the boat
and tromboning at us within pistol-shot, kept us awake at night; and
during the day we could see elephants, buffaloes, deer, and other
large game wandering about the banks. To see the elephant at home is
a sight to remember. The stupendous awkwardness of the menagerie
animal, as if so large a creature were quite a mistake, vanishes
completely when you watch him in his native haunts. Here he is as
nimble as a kitten, and you see how perfectly this moving mountain is
adapted to its habitat--how such a ponderous monster, indeed, is as
natural to these colossal grasses as a rabbit to an English park. We
were extremely fortunate in seeing elephants at all at this stage,
and I question whether there is any other part of Africa where these
animals may be observed leisurely and in safety within six weeks of
London. Mr. Stanley in his Livingstone expedition was ten months in
the country before he saw any; and Mr. Joseph Thomson, during his
long journey to Tanganyika and back, never came across a single
elephant. It is said that the whale which all travellers see in
crossing the Atlantic is kept up by the steamboat companies, but I
vouch that these Shiré valley elephants are independent of subsidy.
The question of the disappearance of the elephant here and throughout
Africa is, as every one knows, only one of a few years. It is hard
to think why this kindly and sagacious creature should have to be
exterminated; why this vast store of animal energy, which might be
turned into so much useful work, should be lost to civilization. But
the causes are not difficult to understand. The African elephant has
never been successfully tamed, and is therefore a failure as a source
of energy. As a source of ivory, on the other hand, he has been but
too great a success. The cost of ivory at present is about
half-a-sovereign per pound. An average tusk weighs from twenty to
thirty pounds. Each animal has two, and in Africa both male and
female carry tusks. The average elephant is therefore worth in
pounds sterling the weight in pounds avoirdupois of one of his tusks.
I have frequently seen single tusks turning the scale upon ninety
pounds, the pair in this case being worth nearly £100 sterling,--so
that a herd of elephants is about as valuable as a gold mine. The
temptation to sacrifice the animal for his tusks is therefore great;
and as he becomes scarcer he will be pursued by the hunter with
ever-increasing eagerness. But the truth is, sad though the
confession be, the sooner the last elephant falls before the hunters
bullet the better for Africa. Ivory introduces into the country at
present an abnormal state of things. Upon this one article is set so
enormous a premium that none other among African products secures the
slightest general attention; nor will almost anyone in the interior
condescend to touch the normal wealth, or develop the legitimate
industries of the country, so long as a tusk remains. In addition to
this, of half the real woes which now exist in Africa ivory is at the
bottom. It is not only that wherever there is an article to which a
fictitious value is attached the effect upon the producer is apt to
be injurious; nor that wherever there is money there is temptation,
covetousness, and war; but that unprincipled men, and especially
Arabs, are brought into contact with the natives in the worst
relation, influence them only in one, and that the lowest, direction,
and leave them always worse than they find them--worse in greed, in
knavery, in their belief in mankind, and in their suspicion of
civilization. Further, for every tusk an Arab trader purchases he
must buy, borrow, or steal a slave to carry it to the coast.
Domestic slavery is bad enough, but now begins the long slave-march
with its untold horrors--horrors instigated and perpetuated almost
solely by the traffic in ivory. The extermination of the elephant,
therefore, will mark one stage at least in the closing up of the
slave-trade. The elephant has done much for Africa. The best he can
do now for his country is to disappear forever.
In books of travel great chiefs are usually called kings, their wives
queens, while their mud-huts are always palaces. But after seeing my
first African chief at home, I found I must either change my views of
kings or of authors. The regal splendor of Chipitula's court--and
Chipitula was a very great chief indeed, and owned all the Shiré
district--may be judged of by the fact that when I paid my respects
to his highness his court-dress consisted almost exclusively of a
pair of suspenders. I made this king happy for life by the gift of a
scarlet tennis-cap and a few buttons. But poor Chipitula had not
long to enjoy his treasures,--and I mention the incident to show what
is going on every day in Africa. When I came back that way, on my
return journey, I called again to receive a leopard skin which this
chief had promised to trap for me, and for which he was to get in
exchange certain dilapidated remnants of my wardrobe. He gave me the
skin; I duly covered his, and we parted. A few days after, another
white man came that way; he was a trader--the only one who has yet
plied this hazardous calling in East Central Africa. He quarrelled
with Chipitula over some bargain, and in a moment of passion drew his
revolver and shot the chief dead on the spot. Of course he himself
was instantly speared by Chipitula's men; and all his black porters,
according to native etiquette, were butchered with their master.
There is absolutely no law in Africa, and you can kill anybody and
anybody can kill you, and no one will ask any questions.
Our next stoppage was to pay another homage--truly this is a tragic
region--at another white man's grave. A few years ago Bishop
Mackenzie and some other missionaries were sent to Africa by the
English Universities, with instructions to try to establish a Mission
in the footsteps of Livingstone. They came here; the climate
overpowered them; one by one they sickened and died. With the death
of the Bishop himself the site was abandoned, and the few survivors
returned home. Among the hippopotamus-trampled reeds on the banks of
the Shiré under a rough iron cross, lies the first of three brave
bishops who have already made their graves in Equatorial Africa.
I have spoken of the Shiré as the great waterway into the interior of
Eastern Africa. It has one defect. After sailing for five or six
days we came to rapids which no boat can pass. These rapids were
named by Livingstone the Murchison Cataracts, and they extend for
seventy miles. This distance, accordingly, must be traversed
overland. Half-way up this seventy miles, and a considerable
distance inland from the river, stands the first white settlement in
East Central Africa--the Blantyre Mission. Bribing about a hundred
natives with a promise of a fathom of calico each, to carry our
luggage, we set off on foot for Blantyre. The traditional
characteristics of African caravaning were displayed in full
perfection during this first experience, and darkness fell when we
were but half-way to our destination. It was our first night in the
bush, and a somewhat unusual introduction to African travelling
marked it. At midnight we were roused by startling cries from our
men, who lay sleeping on the ground around us. The watch-fires must
have burned down, for a lion had suddenly sprung into the camp.
Seizing the man who lay nearest the forest, the animal buried its
claws in his breast, and was making off into the darkness, when the
shouting frightened it and made it drop its prey. Twice during the
night the lion came back, and we whites had to keep watch by turns
till morning with loaded rifles. This is altogether an exceptional
case, for with a good fire one can generally spread his mat anywhere
in the tropics without fear of midnight attack. This is a famous
place, however, for lions, and one can as certainly depend on their
gruesome concert in the early morning as on the sparrows' chirp in
England.
Towards sunset the following evening our caravan filed into Blantyre.
On the beauty and interest of this ideal mission I shall not dwell.
But if anyone wishes to find out what can be done with the virgin
African, what can be done by broad and practical missionary methods,
let him visit the Rev. D. Clement Scott and his friends at Blantyre.
And if he wishes to observe the possibilities of civilization and
colonization among an average African tribe living on an average
African soil, let him examine the mission plantations, and those of
Mr. John and Mr. Frederick Moir at Mandala, and of the Brothers
Buchanan at Zomba. And, further, if he desires to know what the milk
of human kindness is, let him time his attack of fever so that haply
it may coincide with his visit to either of these centres of
self-denying goodness and hospitality.
II.
THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY.
LAKES SHIRWA AND NYASSA.
Somewhere in the Shiré Highlands, in 1859, Livingstone saw a large
lake--Lake Shirwa--which is still almost unknown. It lies away to
the East, and is bounded by a range of mountains whose lofty summits
are visible from the hills round Blantyre. Thinking it might be a
useful initiation to African travel if I devoted a short time to its
exploration, I set off one morning accompanied by two members of the
Blantyre staff and a small retinue of natives. Steering across
country in the direction in which it lay, we found, two days before
seeing the actual water, that we were already on the ancient bed of
the lake. Though now clothed with forest, the whole district has
obviously been under water at a comparatively recent period, and the
shores of Lake Shirwa probably reached at one time to within a few
miles of Blantyre itself. On reaching the lake a very aged female
chief came to see us, and told us how, long, long ago, a white man
came to her village and gave her a present of cloth. Of the white
man, who must have been Livingstone, she spoke very kindly; and,
indeed, wherever David Livingstone's footsteps are crossed in Africa
the fragrance of his memory seems to remain.
The waters of Shirwa are brackish to the taste, and undrinkable; but
the saltness must have a peculiar charm for game, for nowhere else in
Africa did I see such splendid herds of the larger animals as here.
The zebra was especially abundant; and so unaccustomed to be
disturbed are these creatures, that with a little care one could
watch their movements safely within a very few yards. It may seem
unorthodox to say so, but I do not know if among the larger animals
there is any thing handsomer in creation than the zebra. At close
quarters his striped coat is all but as fine as the tiger's, while
the form and movement of his body are in every way nobler. The gait
certainly, is not to be compared for gracefulness with that of the
many species of antelope and deer who nibble the grass beside him,
and one can never quite forget that scientifically he is an ass; but
taking him all in all, this fleet and beautiful animal ought to have
a higher place in the regard of man than he has yet received.
We were much surprised, considering that this region is almost
uninhabited, to discover near the lake shore a native path so beaten,
and so recently beaten by multitudes of human feet, that it could
only represent some trunk route through the continent. Following it
for a few miles, we soon discovered its function. It was one of the
great slave routes through Africa. Signs of the horrid traffic soon
became visible on every side; and from symmetrical arrangements of
small piles of stones and freshly-cut twigs, planted semaphore-wise
upon the path, our native guides made out that a slave-caravan was
actually passing at the time. We were, in fact, between two portions
of it, the stones and twigs being telegraphic signals between front
and rear. Our natives seemed much alarmed at this discovery, and
refused to proceed unless we promised not to interfere--a proceeding
which, had we attempted it, would simply have meant murder for
ourselves and slavery for them. Next day, from a hill-top, we saw
the slave encampment far below, and the ghastly procession
marshalling for its march to the distant coast, which many of the
hundreds who composed it would never reach alive.
Talking of native footpaths leads me to turn aside for a moment to
explain to the uninitiated the true mode of African travel. In spite
of all the books that have been lavished upon us by our great
explorers, few people seem to have any accurate understanding of this
most simple process. Some have the impression that everything is
done in bullock-wagons--an idea borrowed from the Cape, but
hopelessly inapplicable to Central Africa, where a wheel at present
would be as great a novelty as a polar bear. Others at the opposite
extreme suppose that the explorer works along solely by compass,
making a bee-line for his destination, and steering his caravan
through the trackless wilderness like a ship at sea. Now it may be a
surprise to the unenlightened to learn that probably no explorer in
forcing his passage through Africa has ever, for more than a few days
at a time, been off some beaten track. Probably no country in the
world, civilized or uncivilized, is better supplied with paths than
this unmapped continent. Every village is connected with some other
village, every tribe with the next tribe, every state with its
neighbor, and therefore with all the rest. The explorer's business
is simply to select from this network of tracks, keep a general
direction, and hold on his way. Let him begin at Zanzibar, plant his
foot on a native footpath, and set his face towards Tanganyika. In
eight months he will be there. He has simply to persevere. From
village to village he will be handed on, zigzagging it may be
sometimes to avoid the impassable barriers of nature or the rarer
perils of hostile tribes, but never taking to the woods, never guided
solely by the stars, never in fact leaving a beaten track, till
hundreds and hundreds of miles are between him and the sea, and his
interminable footpath ends with a canoe, on the shores of Tanganyika.
Crossing the lake, landing near some native village, he picks up the
thread once more. Again he plods on and on, now on foot, now by
canoe, but always keeping his line of villages, until one day
suddenly he sniffs the sea-breeze again, and his faithful foot-wide
guide lands him on the Atlantic seaboard.
Nor is there any art in finding out these successive villages with
their intercommunicating links. He _must_ find them out. A whole
army of guides, servants, carriers, soldiers and camp-followers
accompany him in his inarch, and this nondescript regiment must be
fed. Indian corn, cassava, mawere, beans, and bananas--these do not
grow wild even in Africa. Every meal has to be bought and paid for
in cloth and beads; and scarcely three days can pass without a call
having to be made at some village where the necessary supplies can be
obtained. A caravan, as a rule, must live from hand to mouth, and
its march becomes simply a regulated procession through a chain of
markets. Not, however, that there are any real markets--there are
neither bazaars nor stores in native Africa. Thousands of the
villages through which the traveller eats his way may never have
victualled a caravan before. But, with the chief's consent, which is
usually easily purchased for a showy present, the villages unlock
their larders, the women flock to the grinding stones, and basketfuls
of food are swiftly exchanged for unknown equivalents in beads and
calico.
The native tracks which I have just described are the same in
character all over Africa. They are veritable footpaths, never over
a foot in breadth, beaten as hard as adamant, and rutted beneath the
level of the forest bed by centuries of native traffic. As a rule
these footpaths are marvellously direct. Like the roads of the old
Romans, they run straight on through everything, ridge and mountain
and valley, never shying at obstacles, nor anywhere turning aside to
breathe. Yet within this general straightforwardness there is a
singular eccentricity and indirectness in detail. Although the
African footpath is on the whole a bee-line, no fifty yards of it are
ever straight. And the reason is not far to seek. If a stone is
encountered no native will ever think of removing it. Why should he?
It is easier to walk round it. The next man who comes that way will
do the same. He knows that a hundred men are following him; he looks
at the stone; a moment, and it might be unearthed and tossed aside,
but no; he also holds on his way. It is not that he resents the
trouble, it is the idea that is wanting. It would no more occur to
him that that stone was a displaceable object, and that for the
general weal he might displace it, than that its feldspar was of the
orthoclase variety. Generations and generations of men have passed
that stone, and it still waits for a man with an altruistic idea.
But it would be a very stony country indeed--and Africa is far from
stony--that would wholly account for the aggravating obliqueness and
indecision of the African footpath. Probably each four miles, on an
average path, is spun out by an infinite series of minor sinuosities,
to five or six. Now these deflections are not meaningless. Each has
some history--a history dating back, perhaps, a thousand years, but
to which all clue has centuries ago been lost. The leading cause,
probably, is fallen trees. When a tree falls across a path no man
ever removes it. As in the case of the stone, the native goes round
it. It is too green to burn in his hut; before it is dry, and the
white ants have eaten it, the new detour has become part and parcel
of the path. The smaller irregularities, on the other hand,
represent the trees and stumps of the primeval forest where the track
was made at first. But whatever the cause, it is certain that for
persistent straightforwardness in the general, and utter vacillation
and irresolution in the particular, the African roads are unique in
engineering.
Though one of the smaller African lakes, Shirwa is probably larger
than all the lakes of Great Britain put together. With the splendid
environment of mountains on three of its sides, softened and
distanced by perpetual summer haze, it reminds one somewhat of the
Great Salt Lake simmering in a July sun. We pitched our tent for a
day or two on its western shore among a harmless and surprised people
who had never gazed on the pallid countenances of Englishmen before.
Owing to the ravages of the slaver the people of Shirwa are few,
scattered and poor, and live in abiding terror. The densest
population is to be found on the small island, heavily timbered with
baobabs, which forms a picturesque feature of the northern end.
These Wa-Nyassa, or people of the lake, as they call themselves, have
been driven here by fear, and they rarely leave their Lake-Dwelling
unless under cover of night. Even then they are liable to capture by
any man of a stronger tribe who happens to meet them, and numbers who
have been kidnapped in this way are to be found in the villages of
neighboring chiefs. This is an amenity of existence in Africa that
strikes one as very terrible. It is impossible for those at home to
understand how literally savage man is a chattel, and how much his
life is spent in the more safeguarding of his main asset, _i.e._,
himself. There are actually districts in Africa where _three_
natives cannot be sent a message in case two should combine and sell
the third before they return.
After some time spent in the Lake Shirwa and Shiré districts, I set
out for the Upper Shiré and Lake Nyassa. Two short days' walk from
the settlement at Blantyre brings one once more to the banks of the
Shiré. Here I found waiting the famous little _Ilala_, a tiny
steamer, little bigger than a large steam launch. It belonged
originally to the missionaries on Lake Nyassa, and was carried here a
few years ago from England in seven hundred pieces, and bolted
together on the river bank. No chapter in romance is more
interesting than the story of the pioneer voyage of the _Ilala_, as
it sailed away for the first time towards the unknown waters of
Nyassa. No keel had ever broken the surface of this mighty lake
before, and the wonderment of the natives as the Big Canoe hissed
past their villages is described by those who witnessed it as a
spectacle of indescribable interest. The _Ilala_ is named, of
course, after the village where David Livingstone breathed his last.
It indicates the heroic mission of the little ship--to take up the
work of Civilization and Christianity where the great explorer left
it. The _Ilala_ now plies at intervals between the Upper
Shiré--above the cataracts--and the shores of Lake Nyassa, carrying
supplies to the handful of missionaries settled on the western shore.
Though commanded by a white man, the work on board is entirely done
by natives from the locality. The confidence of the black people
once gained, no great difficulty seems to have been found in getting
volunteers enough for this novel employment. Singularly enough,
while deck hands are often only enlisted after some persuasion, the
competition for the office of fireman--a disagreeable post at any
time, but in the tropical heat the last to be coveted--is so keen
that any number of natives are at all times ready to be frizzled in
the stokehole. Instead of avoiding heat, the African native
everywhere courts it. His nature expands and revels in it; while a
breath of cold on a mountain slope, or a sudden shower of rain,
transforms him instantly into a most woebegone object.
After leaving Matope, just above the Murchison cataracts, the _Ilala_
steams for a couple of days in the river before Lake Nyassa is
reached. The valley throughout this length is very broad, bounded on
either side by distant mountains which at an earlier period probably
formed the shores of a larger Lake Nyassa. The fact that Lake Nyassa
is silting up at its southern end becomes more apparent as one nears
the lake, for here one finds a considerable expanse already cut off
from the larger portion, and forming a separate sheet of water. The
smaller lake is Lake Pomalombe, and it is already so shallow that in
the dry season the _Ilala's_ screw stirs the gray mud at the bottom.
The friendship of the few villages along the bank is secured by an
occasional present; although the relations between some of them and
the Big Canoe are at times a little strained, and in bad humors
doubtless they would send it to the bottom if they dared. It is to
be remembered that this whole region is as yet altogether beyond the
limits, and almost beyond the knowledge of civilization, and few
white men have ever been in the country, except the few agents
connected with the Lakes Company and the Missions. Beyond an
occasional barter of cloth or beads for firewood and food, the
_Ilala_ has no dealings with the tribes on the Upper Shiré, and at
present they are about as much affected by the passing to and fro of
the white man's steamer as are the inhabitants of Kensington by an
occasional wild-fowl making for Regent's Park. One is apt to
conclude, from the mere presence of such a thing as a steamer in
Central Africa, that the country through which it is passing must be
in some sense civilized, and the hourly reminders to the contrary
which one receives on the spot are among the most startling
experiences of the traveller. It is almost impossible for him to
believe, as he watches the native life from the cabin of the _Ilala_,
that these people are altogether uncivilized; just as it is
impossible for him to believe that that lurch a moment ago was caused
by the little craft bumping against a submerged hippopotamus. A
steel ship, London built, steaming six knots ahead; and grass huts,
nude natives, and a hippopotamus--the ideas refuse to assort
themselves, and one lives in a perpetual state of bewilderment and
interrogation.
It was a brilliant summer morning when the _Ilala_ steamed into Lake
Nyassa, and in a few hours we were at anchor in the little bay at
Livingstonia, My first impression of this famous mission-station
certainly will never be forgotten. Magnificent mountains of granite,
green to the summit with forest, encircled it, and on the silver sand
of a still smaller bay stood the small row of trim white cottages. A
neat path through a small garden led up to the settlement, and I
approached the largest house and entered. It was the Livingstonia
manse--the head missionary's house. It was spotlessly clean; English
furniture was in the room, a medicine chest, familiar-looking dishes
were in the cupboards, books lying about, but there was no missionary
in it. I went to the next house--it was the school, the benches were
there and the blackboard, but there were no scholars and no teacher.
I passed to the next, it was the blacksmith shop; there were the
tools and the anvil, but there was no blacksmith. And so on to the
next, and the next, all in perfect order, and all _empty_. Then a
native approached and led me a few yards into the forest. And there
among the mimosa trees, under a huge granite mountain, were four or
five graves. These were the missionaries.
I spent a day or two in the solemn shadow of that deserted manse. It
is one of the loveliest spots in the world; and it was hard to
believe, sitting under the tamarind trees by the quiet lake shore,
that the pestilence which wasteth at midnight had made this beautiful
spot its home. A hundred and fifty miles north, on the same
lake-coast, the remnant of the missionaries have begun their task
again, and there, slowly, against fearful odds, they are carrying on
their work. Travellers have been pleased to say unkind things of
missionaries. That they are sometimes right, I will not question.
But I will say of the Livingstonia missionaries, and of the Blantyre
missionaries, and count it an honor to say it, that they are brave,
efficient, single-hearted men, who need our sympathy more than we
know, and are equally above our criticism and our praise.
Malarial fever is the one sad certainty which every African traveller
must face. For months he may escape, but its finger is upon him, and
well for him if he has a friend near when it finally overtakes him.
It is preceded for weeks, or even for a month or two, by
unaccountable irritability, depression and weariness. On the march
with his men he has scarcely started when he sighs for the noon-day
rest. Putting it down to mere laziness, he goads himself on by
draughts from the water-bottle, and totters forward a mile or two
more. Next he finds himself skulking into the forest on the pretext
of looking at a specimen, and, when his porters are out of sight,
throws himself under a tree in utter limpness and despair. Roused by
mere shame, he staggers along the trail, and as he nears the mid-day
camp puts on a spurt to conceal his defeat, which finishes him for
the rest of the day. This is a good place for specimens he tells the
men--the tent may be pitched for the night. This goes on day after
day till the crash comes--first cold and pain, then heat and pain,
then every kind of pain, and every degree of heat, then delirium,
then the life-and-death struggle. He rises, if he does rise, a
shadow; and slowly accumulates strength for the next attack, which he
knows too well will not disappoint him. No one has ever yet got to
the bottom of African fever. Its geographical distribution is still
unmapped, but generally it prevails over the whole east and west
coasts within the tropical limit, along all the river-courses, on the
shores of the inland lakes, and in all low-lying and marshy
districts. The higher plateaux, presumably, are comparatively free
from it, but in order to reach these, malarious districts of greater
or smaller area have to be traversed. There the system becomes
saturated with fever, which often develops long after the infected
region is left behind. The known facts with regard to African fever
are these: First, it is connected in some way with drying-up water
and decaying vegetation, though how the germs develop, or what they
are, is unknown. Second, natives suffer from fever equally with
Europeans, and this more particularly in changing from district to
district and from altitude to altitude. Thus, in marching over the
Tanganyika plateau, four or five of my native carriers were down with
fever, although their homes were only two or three hundred miles off,
before I had even a touch of it. Third, quinine is the great and
almost the sole remedy; and, fourth, no European ever escapes it.
The really appalling mortality of Europeans is a fact with which all
who have any idea of casting in their lot with Africa should
seriously reckon. None but those who have been on the spot, or have
followed closely the inner history of African exploration and
missionary work can appreciate the gravity of the situation. The
malaria spares no man; the strong fall as the weak; no number of
precautions can provide against it; no kind of care can do more than
make the attacks less frequent; no prediction can be made beforehand
as to which regions are haunted by it and which are safe. It is not
the least ghastly feature of this invisible plague that the only
known scientific test for it at present is a human life. That test
has been applied in the Congo region already with a recklessness
which the sober judgment can only characterize as criminal. It is a
small matter that men should throw away their lives, in hundreds, if
need be, for a holy cause; but it is not a small matter that man
after man, in long and in fatal succession, should seek to overleap
what is plainly a barrier of Nature. And science has a duty in
pointing out that no devotion or enthusiasm can give any man a
charmed life, and that those who work for the highest ends will best
attain them in humble obedience to the common laws.
Transcendentally, this may be denied; the warning finger may be
despised as the hand of the coward and the profane. But the fact
remains--the fact of an awful chain of English graves stretching
across Africa. This is not spoken, nevertheless, to discourage
missionary enterprise. It is only said to regulate it.
To the head of Lake Nyassa in a little steam yacht is quite a
sea-voyage. What with heavy seas, and head-winds, and stopping to
wood, and lying-to at nights, it takes longer time than going from
England to America. The lake is begirt with mountains, and storms
are so incessant and so furious that Livingstone actually christened
Nyassa the "Lake of Storms." The motion on anchoring at night was
generally so unpleasant that one preferred then to be set on shore.
My men--for I had already begun to pick up my caravan whenever I
could find a native willing to go--would kindle fires all round to
keep off beasts of prey, and we slept in peace upon the soft lake
sand.
Instead of being one hundred and fifty miles long, as first supposed,
Lake Nyassa is now known to have a length of three hundred and fifty
miles, and a breadth varying from sixteen to sixty miles. It
occupies a gigantic trough of granite and gneiss, the profoundly deep
water standing at a level of sixteen hundred feet above the sea, with
the mountains rising all around it, and sometimes sheer above it, to
a height of one, two, three, and four thousand feet. The mountains
along the west coast form an almost unbroken chain, while the
north-east and north are enclosed by the vast range of the
Livingstone Mountains. The anchorages on the lake are neither so
numerous nor so sheltered as might be wished, but the _Ilala_ has
picked out some fair harbors on the west coast, and about half as
many are already known on the east.
I only visited one native village on the lake, and I should hope
there are none others like it--indeed it was quite exceptional for
Africa. I tumbled into it early one morning, out of the _Ilala's_
dingy, and lost myself at once in an endless labyrinth of reeking
huts. Its filth was indescribable, and I met stricken men, at the
acute stage of smallpox, wandering about the place at every turn, as
if infection were a thing unknown. The chief is the greatest slaver
and the worst villain on the lake, and impaled upon poles all round
his lodge, their ghastly faces shrivelling in the sun, I counted
forty human heads.
This village was not African, however. It was Arab. The native
villages on Nyassa are rarely so large, seldom so compact, and never
so dirty. Everywhere they straggle along the shore and through the
forest, and altogether there must be many hundreds of them scattered
about the lake. On the western shore alone there are at least
fifteen different tribes, speaking as many different languages, and
each of them with dialects innumerable.
The bright spot on Lake Nyassa is Bandawé, the present headquarters
of the Scotch Livingstonia Mission. The phrase "headquarters of a
mission" suggests to the home Christian a street and a square, with
its overshadowing church; a decent graveyard; and a reverent
community in its Sunday clothes. But Bandawé is only a lodge or two
in a vast wilderness, and the swarthy worshippers flock to the
seatless chapel on M'lunga's day dressed mostly in bows and arrows.
The said chapel, nevertheless, is as great an achievement in its way
as Cologne Cathedral, and its worshippers are quite as much
interested, and some of them at least to quite as much purpose. In
reality no words can be a fit witness here to the impression made by
Dr. Laws, Mrs. Laws, and their few helpers, upon this singular and
apparently intractable material. A visit to Bandawé is a great moral
lesson. And I cherish no more sacred memory of my life than that of
a communion service in the little Bandawé chapel, when the
sacramental cup was handed to me by the bare black arm of a native
communicant--a communicant whose life, tested afterwards in many an
hour of trial with me on the Tanganyika plateau, gave him perhaps a
better right to be there than any of us.
III.
THE HEART OF AFRICA.
THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE.
We are now far enough into the interior to form some general idea of
the aspect of the heart of Africa. I shall not attempt to picture
any particular spot. The description about to be given applies
generally to Shirwa, the Shiré Highlands, Nyassa, and the
Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau--regions which together make up one of the
great lobes of the heart of Africa.
Nothing could more wildly misrepresent the reality than the idea of
one's school days that the heart of Africa is a desert. Africa rises
from its three environing oceans in three great tiers, and the
general physical geography of these has been already sketched--first,
a coast-line, low and deadly; farther in, a plateau the height of the
Scottish Grampians; farther in still, a higher plateau, covering the
country for thousands of miles with mountain and valley. Now fill in
this sketch, and you have Africa before you. Cover the coast belt
with rank yellow grass, dot here and there a palm; scatter through it
a few demoralized villages; and stock it with the leopard, the hyena,
the crocodile, and the hippopotamus. Clothe the mountainous plateaux
next--both of them--with endless forest,--not grand umbrageous forest
like the forests of South America, nor matted jungle like the forests
of India, but with thin, rather weak forest,--with forest of low
trees, whose half-grown trunks and scanty leaves offer no shade from
the tropical sun. Nor is there anything in these trees to the casual
eye to remind you that you are in the tropics. Here and there one
comes upon a borassus or fan-palm, a candelabra-like euphorbia, a
mimosa aflame with color, or a sepulchral baobab. A close inspection
also will discover curious creepers and climbers; and among the
branches strange orchids hide their eccentric flowers. But the
outward type of tree is the same as we have at home--trees resembling
the ash, the beech, and the elm, only seldom so large, except by the
streams, and never so beautiful.[1] Day after day you may wander
through these forests with nothing except the climate to remind you
where you are. The beasts, to be sure, are different, but unless you
watch for them you will seldom see any; the birds are different, but
you rarely hear them; and as for the rocks, they are our own familiar
gneisses and granites, with honest basalt-dykes boring through them,
and leopard-skin lichens staining their weathered sides. Thousands
and thousands of miles, then, of vast thin forest, shadeless,
trackless, voiceless--forest in mountain and forest in plain--this is
East Central Africa.
[1] The more important of these trees are--_Napaca Kirkii_,
_Brachystegia longifolia_, _Vitex umbrosa_, _Erythrina speciosa_,
_Ficus sycamorus_, _Khaya senegalensis_, _Nuxia congesta_,
_Parinarium mobola_, and _Erythrophlœum guineensis_.
The indiscriminate praise formerly lavished on tropical vegetation
has received many shocks from recent travellers. In Kaffirland,
South Africa, I have seen one or two forests fine enough to justify
the enthusiasm of armchair word-painters of the tropics; but so far
as the central plateau is concerned, the careful judgment of Mr.
Alfred Russel Wallace respecting the equatorial belt in general--a
judgment which has at once sobered all modern descriptions of
tropical lands, and made imaginative people more content to stay at
home--applies almost to this whole area. The fairy labyrinth of
ferns and palms, the festoons of climbing plants blocking the paths
and scenting the forests with their resplendent flowers, the gorgeous
clouds of insects, the gaily-plumaged birds, the paroquets, the
monkey swinging from his trapeze in the shaded bowers--these are
unknown to Africa. Once a week you will see a palm; once in three
months the monkey will cross your path; the flowers on the whole are
few; the trees are poor; and, to be honest, though the endless
forest-clad mountains have a sublimity of their own, and though there
are tropical bits along some of the mountain-streams of exquisite
beauty, nowhere is there anything in grace and sweetness and strength
to compare with a Highland glen. For the most part of the year these
forests are jaded and sun-stricken, carpeted with no moss or
alchemylla or scented woodruff, the bare trunks frescoed with few
lichens, their motionless and unrefreshed leaves drooping sullenly
from their sapless boughs. Flowers there are, small and great, in
endless variety; but there is no display of flowers, no gorgeous show
of blossom in the mass, as when the blazing gorse and heather bloom
at home. The dazzling glare of the sun in the torrid zone has
perhaps something to do with this want of color-effect in tropical
nature; for there is always about ten minutes just after sunset, when
the whole tone of the landscape changes like magic, and a singular
beauty steals over the scene. This is the sweetest moment of the
African day, and night hides only too swiftly the homelike softness
and repose so strangely grateful to the over-stimulated eye.
Hidden away in these endless forests, like birds' nests in a wood, in
terror of one another, and of their common foe, the slaver, are small
native villages; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells the
primeval man, without clothes, without civilization, without
learning, without religion--the genuine child of nature, thoughtless,
careless, and contented. This man is apparently quite happy; he has
practically no wants. One stick, pointed, makes him a spear; two
sticks rubbed together make him a fire; fifty sticks tied together
make him a house. The bark he peels from them makes his clothes; the
fruits which hang on them form his food. It is perfectly astonishing
when one thinks of it what nature can do for the animal-man, to see
with what small capital after all a human being can get through the
world. I once saw an African buried. According to the custom of his
tribe, his entire earthly possessions--and he was an average
commoner--were buried with him. Into the grave, after the body, was
lowered the dead man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a mud bowl, and
last his bow and arrows--the bow string cut through the middle, a
touching symbol that its work was done. This was all. Four items,
as an auctioneer would say, were the whole belongings for half a
century of this human being. No man knows what a man is till he has
seen what a man can be without, and be withal a man. That is to say,
no man knows how great man is till he has seen how small he has been
once.
The African is often blamed for being lazy, but it is a misuse of
words. He does not need to work; with so bountiful a nature round
him it would be gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as
it is called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and
as little blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise. The fact is, Africa
is a nation of the unemployed.
This completeness, however, will be a sad drawback to development.
Already it is found difficult to create new wants; and when labor is
required, and you have already paid your man a yard of calico and a
string of beads, you have nothing in your possession to bribe him to
another hand's turn. Nothing almost that you have would be the
slightest use to him. Among the presents which I took for chiefs, I
was innocent enough to include a watch. I might as well have taken a
grand piano. For months I never looked at my own watch in that land
of sunshine. Besides, the mere idea of time has scarcely yet
penetrated the African mind, and forms no element whatever in his
calculations. I wanted on one occasion to catch the little steamer
on the Shiré, and pleaded this as an excuse to a rather powerful
chief, whom it would have been dangerous to quarrel with, and who
would not let me leave his village. The man merely stared. The idea
of any one being in a hurry was not only preposterous but
inconceivable, and I might as well have urged as my reason for
wishing away that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right
angles.
This difference in ideas is the real obstacle to African travelling,
and it raises all sorts of problems in one's mind as to the nature of
ideas themselves. I often wished I could get inside an African for
an afternoon, and just see how he looked at things; for I am sure our
worlds are as different as the color of our skins.
Talking of skins, I may observe in passing that the highland African
is not a negro, nor is his skin black. It is a deep full-toned
brown, something like the color of a good cigar. The whole surface
is diced with a delicate pattern, which gives it great richness and
beauty, and I often thought how effective a row of books would be
bound in native-morocco.
No one knows exactly who these people are. They belong, of course,
to the great Bantu race; but their origin is obscure, their tribal
boundaries are unmapped, even their names are unknown, and their
languages---for they are many--are unintelligible. A fine-looking
people, quiet and domestic, their life-history from the cradle to the
grave is of the utmost simplicity. Too ill armed to hunt, they live
all but exclusively on a vegetable diet. A small part of the year
they depend, like the monkeys, upon wild fruits and herbs; but the
staple food is a small tasteless millet-seed which they grow in
gardens, crush in a mortar, and stir with water into a thick
porridge. Twice a day, nearly all the year round, each man stuffs
himself with this coarse and tasteless dough, shoveling it into his
mouth in handfuls, and consuming at a sitting a pile the size of an
ant-heap. His one occupation is to grow this millet, and his
gardening is a curiosity. Selecting a spot in the forest, he climbs
a tree, and with a small home-made axe lops off the branches one by
one. He then wades through the litter to the next tree, and hacks it
to pieces also, leaving the trunk standing erect. Upon all the trees
within a circle of thirty or forty yards diameter his axe works
similar havoc, till the ground stands breast-high in leaves and
branches. Next, the whole is set on fire and burned to ashes. Then,
when the first rains moisten the hard ground and wash the fertile
chemical constituents of the ash into the soil, he attacks it with
his hoe, drops in a few handfuls of millet, and the year's work is
over. But a few weeks off and on are required for these operations,
and he may then go to sleep till the rains are over, assured of a
crop which never fails, which is never poor, and which will last him
till the rains return again.
Between the acts he does nothing but lounge and sleep; his wife, or
wives, are the millers and bakers; they work hard to prepare his
food, and are rewarded by having to take their own meals apart, for
no African would ever demean himself by eating with a woman. I have
tried to think of something else that these people habitually do, but
their vacuous life leaves nothing more to tell.
Apart from eating, their sole occupation is to talk, and this they do
unceasingly, emphasizing their words with a marvellous wealth of
gesticulation. Talking, indeed, is an art here--the art it must once
have been in Europe before the newspaper drove it out of fashion.
The native voices are sometimes highly musical, though in the strict
sense the people have no notion whatever of singing; and the
languages themselves are full of melody. Every word, like the
Italian, ends in a vowel, and when well spoken they are exceedingly
effective and full of character.
Notwithstanding their rudimentary estate, the people of Africa have
the beginnings of all the more characteristic things that make up the
life of civilized man. They have a national amusement, the dance; a
national musical instrument, the drum; a national drink, _pombé_; a
national religion, the fear of evil spirits. Their chamber of
justice is a council of head-men or chiefs; their court of appeal,
the _muavi_, or poison cup. No new thing is found here that is not
in some form in modern civilization; no new thing in civilization but
has its embryo and prophecy in the simpler life of these primitive
tribes. To the ignorant these men are animals; but the eye of
evolution looks on them with a kindlier and more instructed sense.
They are what we were once; possibly they may become what we are now.
What, then, is to become of this strange people and their land? With
the glowing figures of a very distinguished traveller in our minds,
are we to expect that the Shiré and Congo routes have but to be
connected with New York and Manchester to cause at once a revolution
among the people of Africa and in the commerce of the world? We hear
two criticisms upon that subject. One complains that while Mr.
Stanley emphasizes in the most convincing way the thousands of miles
of cloth the African is waiting to receive from Europe, he is all but
silent as to what Europe is to get in return. A second remark is
that Africa has nothing to give in return, and never will have.
The facts of the case briefly, as it seems to me, are these:--
First, The only thing of value the interior of Africa produces at
present in any quantity is ivory. There is still, undoubtedly, a
supply of this precious material in the country--a supply which may
last yet for fifteen or twenty years. But it is well to frame future
calculation on the certainty of this abnormal source of wealth
ceasing, as it must do, in the immediate future.
Second, Africa already produces in a wild state a number of vegetable
and other products of considerable commercial value; and although the
soil can only be said to be of average fertility, there is
practically no limit to the extent to which these could be developed.
Wild indigo--the true _indigofera tinctoria_ is already growing on
the hills of the interior. The Londolphia, an indiarubber-bearing
creeper, is to be seen on most of the watercourses; and a variety of
the _Ficus elastica_, the well-known rubber plant, abounds on Lake
Nyassa. The orchilla weed is common. The castor-oil plant, ginger,
and other spices, the tobacco-plant, the cotton-plant, and many
fibre-yielding grasses, are also found; and oil-seeds of every
variety and in endless quantity are grown by the natives for local
use.
The fatal drawback, meantime, to the further development of these
comparatively invaluable products is the transit, carriage to the
coast from Nyassa or Tanganyika being almost prohibitive. Up till
very recently only two native products have ever been exported from
this region--indiarubber and beeswax, and these in but trifling
quantity. But there is no reason why these products should not be
largely developed, and freights must become lower and lower every
year. In addition to the plants named, the soil of Central Africa is
undoubtedly adapted for growing coffee; and the Cinchona would
probably flourish well on the higher grounds of the Tanganyika
plateau.
I must not omit to mention in this connection that an attempt is now
being made, and so far with marked success, to form actual
plantations in the interior of Africa; and the result of the
experiment ought to be watched with exceptional interest. Mr. Moir,
on behalf of the African Lakes Company, and the Brothers Buchanan on
their own account, and also Mr. Scott, with remarkable industry and
enterprise have each formed at Blantyre a coffee plantation of
considerable size. The plants, when I saw them, were still young,
but very healthy and promising, and already a first crop of fine
coffee-berries hung from the trees, and has since been marketed.
These same gentlemen have also grown heavy crops of wheat; and Mr.
Buchanan has succeeded well with sugar-cane, potatoes and other
English vegetables. The manual work here has been entirely done by
natives; and an immense saving to resident Europeans will be effected
when the interior is able to provide its own food supplies, for at
present wheat, coffee, and sugar, have all to be imported from home.
With so satisfactory an account of the possibilities of the country,
the only question that remains is this--Can the African native really
be taught to work?
This question I answer unhesitatingly in the affirmative. I have
described Africa as a nation of the unemployed. But the sole reason
for the current impression that the African is an incorrigible idler
is that at present there is really nothing for him to do. But that
he can work and will work when the opportunity and inducement offer
has been proved by experiment. The coast native, as all must testify
who have seen him in the harbor of Zanzibar, Mozambique, Delagoa Bay,
Natal, or the other eastern ports, is, with all allowances, a
splendid worker; and though the experiment has seldom been tried in
the interior, it is well known that the capacity is there, and
wherever encouraged yields results beyond all expectation. Probably
the severest test to which the native of Central Africa has ever been
put is the construction of the Stevenson road, between Lakes Nyassa
and Tanganyika. Forty-six miles of that road--probably the only
thing of the kind in Central Africa--have already been made entirely
by native labor, and the work could not have been better done had it
been executed by English navvies. I have watched by the day a party
of seventy natives working at a cutting upon that road. Till three
or four years ago none of them had ever looked upon a white man; nor,
till a few months previously, had one of them seen a spade, a
pickaxe, or a crowbar. Yet these savages handled their tools to such
purpose that, with only a single European superintendent, they have
made a road, full of difficult cuttings and gradients, which would
not disgrace a railway contractor at home. The workmen keep regular
hours--six in the morning till five at night, with a rest at
mid-day--work steadily, continuously, willingly, and above all,
merrily. This goes on, observe, in the heart of the tropics, almost
under the equator itself, where the white man's energy evaporates,
and leaves him so limp that he cannot even be an example to his men.
This goes on too without any compulsion; the natives flock from far
and near, sometimes from long distances, to try this new sensation of
work. These men are not slaves, but volunteers; and though they are
paid by the fortnight, many will remain at their post the whole
season through. The only bribe for all this work is a yard or two of
calico per week per man; so that it seems to me one of the greatest
problems of the future of Africa is here solved. In capacity the
African is fit to work, in inclination he is willing to work, and in
actual experiment he has done it; so that with capital enlisted and
wise heads to direct these energies, with considerate employers who
will remember that these men are but children, this vast nation of
the unemployed may yet be added to the slowly growing list of the
world's producers.
Africa at this moment has an impossible access, a perilous climate, a
penniless people, an undeveloped soil. So once had England. It may
never be done; other laws may operate, unforeseen factors may
interfere; but there is nothing in the soil, the products, the
climate, or the people of Africa, to forbid its joining even at this
late day in the great march of civilization.
IV.
THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA.
ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE.
The life of the native African is not all idyll. It is darkened by a
tragedy whose terrors are unknown to any other people under heaven.
Of its mild domestic slavery I do not speak, nor of its revolting
witchcraft, nor of its endless quarrels and frequent tribal wars.
These minor evils are lost in the shadow of a great and national
wrong. Among these simple and unprotected tribes, Arabs--uninvited
strangers of another race and nature--pour in from the North and
East, with the deliberate purpose of making this paradise a hell. It
seems the awful destiny of this homeless people to spend their lives
in breaking up the homes of others. Wherever they go in Africa the
followers of Islam are the destroyers of peace, the breakers up of
the patriarchal life, the dissolvers of the family tie. Already they
hold the whole Continent under one reign of terror. They have
effected this in virtue of one thing--they possess firearms; and they
do it for one object--ivory and slaves, for these two are one. The
slaves are needed to buy ivory with; then more slaves have to be
stolen to carry it. So living man himself has become the commercial
currency of Africa. He is locomotive, he is easily acquired, he is
immediately negotiable.
Arab encampments for carrying on a wholesale trade in this terrible
commodity are now established all over the heart of Africa. They are
usually connected with wealthy Arab traders at Zanzibar and other
places on the coast, and communication is kept up by caravans which
pass, at long intervals, from one to the other. Being always large
and well supplied with the material of war, these caravans have at
their mercy the feeble and divided native tribes through which they
pass, and their trail across the Continent is darkened with every
aggravation of tyranny and crime. They come upon the scene suddenly;
they stay only long enough to secure their end, and disappear only to
return when a new crop has arisen which is worth the reaping.
Sometimes these Arab traders will actually settle for a year or two
in the heart of some quiet community in the remote interior. They
pretend perfect friendship; they molest no one; they barter honestly.
They plant the seeds of their favorite vegetables and fruits--the
Arab always carries seeds with him--as if they meant to stay for
ever. Meantime they buy ivory, tusk after tusk, until great piles of
it are buried beneath their huts and all their barter-goods are gone.
Then one day, suddenly, the inevitable quarrel is picked. And then
follows a wholesale massacre. Enough only are spared from the
slaughter to carry the ivory to the coast; the grass-huts of the
villages are set on fire; the Arabs strike camp; and the slave-march,
worse than death, begins.
This last act in the drama, the slave-march, is the aspect of slavery
which, in the past, has chiefly aroused the passions and the sympathy
of the outside world, but the greater evil is the demoralization and
disintegration of communities by which it is necessarily preceded.
It is essential to the traffic that the region drained by the slaver
should be kept in perpetual political ferment; that, in order to
prevent combination, chief should be pitted against chief; and that
the moment any tribe threatened to assume a dominating strength it
should either be broken up by the instigation of rebellion among its
dependencies, or made a tool of at their expense. The inter-relation
of tribe with tribe is so intricate that it is impossible to
exaggerate the effect of disturbing the equilibrium at even a single
centre. But, like a river, a slave-caravan has to be fed by
innumerable tributaries all along its course--at first in order to
gather a sufficient volume of human bodies for the start, and
afterwards to replace the frightful loss by desertion, disablement,
and death.
Many at home imagine that the death-knell of slavery was struck with
the events which followed the death of Livingstone. In the great
explorer's time we heard much of slavery; we were often appealed to;
the Government busied itself; something was really done. But the
wail is already forgotten, and England hears little now of the open
sore of the world. But the tragedy I have alluded to is repeated
every year and every month--witness such recent atrocities as those
of the Upper Congo, the Kassai and Sankaru region described by
Wissmann, of the Welle-Inakua district referred to by Van Gele. It
was but yesterday that an explorer, crossing from Lake Nyassa to Lake
Tanganyika, saw the whole southern end of Tanganyika peopled with
large and prosperous villages. The next to follow him found not a
solitary human being--nothing but burned homes and bleaching
skeletons. It was but yesterday--the close of 1887--that the Arabs
at the north end of Lake Nyassa, after destroying fourteen villages
with many of their inhabitants, pursued the population of one village
into a patch of tall dry grass, set it on fire, surrounded it, and
slew with the bullet and the spear those who crawled out from the
more merciful flames. The Wa-Nkonde tribe, to which these people
belonged, were, until this event, one of the most prosperous tribes
in East Central Africa. They occupied a country of exceptional
fertility and beauty. Three rivers, which never failed in the
severest drought, run through their territory, and their crops were
the richest and most varied in the country. They possessed herds of
cattle and goats; they fished in the lake with nets; they wrought
iron into many-patterned spearheads with exceptional ingenuity and
skill; and that even artistic taste had begun to develop among them
was evident from the ornamental work upon their huts, which were
themselves unique in Africa for clever construction and beauty of
design. This people, in short, by their own inherent ability and the
natural resources of their country, were on the high road to
civilization. Now, mark the swift stages in their decline and fall.
Years ago an almost unnoticed rill from that great Arab stream, which
with noiseless current and ever-changing bed has never ceased to flow
through Africa, trickled into the country. At first the Arab was
there on sufferance; he paid his way. Land was bought from the
Wa-Nkonde chiefs, and their sovereignty acknowledged. The Arab force
grew. In time it developed into a powerful incursion, and the Arabs
began openly to assert themselves. One of their own number was
elevated to the rulership, with the title of "Sultan of Nkonde." The
tension became great, and finally too severe to last. After
innumerable petty fights the final catastrophe was hurried on, and
after an atrocious carnage the remnant of the Wa-Nkonde were driven
from their fatherland. Such is the very last chapter in the history
of Arab rule in Africa.
The Germans, the Belgians, the English, and the Portuguese, are
crying out at present for territory in Central Africa. Meantime
humanity is crying out for some one to administer the country; for
some one to claim it, not by delimiting a frontier-line upon a map
with colored crayons, but by seeing justice done upon the spot; for
some one with a strong arm and a pitiful heart to break the Arab yoke
and keep these unprotected children free. It has been reserved for a
small company of English gentlemen to arrest the hand of the raider
in the episode I have just described. While Germany covets
Nyassa-land, while Portugal claims it, while England has sent a
consul there, without protection, to safeguard British missionary and
trading interests, two agents of the African Lakes Company, two
missionaries, the British Consul at Mozambique, with two companions
who happened to be in Nyassa-land on scientific work, have, at the
risk of their lives, averted further war, and with their own rifles
avenged the crime.
But this fortuitous concourse of English rifles cannot be reckoned
upon every day; nor is it the part of the missionary and the trader
to play the game of war. The one thing needed for Africa at present
is some system of organized protection to the native, and the
decisive breaking of the Arab influence throughout the whole
interior. These events at Lake Nyassa have brought this subject once
more before the civilized world, and I may briefly state the
situation as it at present stands.
Five years ago the British cruisers which had been for years engaged
in suppressing the slave-trade were tempted to relax their efforts.
They had done splendid service. The very sight of the great hull of
the _London_, as she rocked in the harbor of Zanzibar, had a pacific
influence; and as the caravans from the interior came and went at
intervals of years and found the cruiser's cannon still pointing to
their sultan's palace, they carried the fear of England over the
length and breadth of Africa. The slave-trade was seriously
discouraged, and, so far as the coast traffic was concerned, it was
all but completely arrested. What work, up to this point, was done,
was well done; but, after all, only half the task had ever been
attempted. It was not enough to stop the sewer at its mouth; its
sources in the heart of Africa should have been sought out and
purified. But now that even the menace at Zanzibar no longer
threatened the slavers, their work was resumed with redoubled energy.
The withdrawal of the _London_ was interpreted to mean either that
England conceived her work to be done or that she had grown apathetic
and would interfere no more.
The consequences were almost immediately disastrous. A new license
to devastate, to murder, and to enslave, was telegraphed all over
Africa, and speedily found expression, in widely separated parts of
the country, in horrors the details of which can never be known to
the civilized world. The disturbances on Lake Nyassa undoubtedly
belong, though indirectly, to this new category of crime. Already
the Arabs have learned that there is no one now to take them to task.
In one district after another they have played their game and won;
and with ample power, with absolute immunity from retribution, and
with the sudden creation of a new demand for slaves in a quarter of
which I dare not speak further here, their offenses can only increase
in number and audacity. It is remarkable in the Wa-Nkonde episode
that, for the first time probably in Central Africa, the Mohammedan
defiance to the Christian power was open and undisguised. Hitherto
the Arab worked in secret. The mere presence of a white man in the
country was sufficient to stay his hand. On this occasion the Arab
not only did not conceal his doings from the Europeans, nor flee when
he was remonstrated with, but turned and attacked his monitors. The
political significance of this is plain. It is part of a policy. It
is a challenge to Europe from the whole Mohammedan power. Europe in
Africa is divided; Mohammedanism is one. No isolated band of Arabs
would have ventured upon such a line of action unless they were
perfectly sure of their ground. Nor is there any reason why they
should not be sure of their ground. Europe is talking much about
Africa; it is doing nothing. This the Arab has discerned. It is one
of the most astounding facts in morals that England should have kept
the Arab at bay so long. But the time of probation is over. And the
plain issue is now before the world--Is the Arab or the European
henceforth to reign in Africa?
How the European could reign in Africa is a simple problem. The real
difficulty is as to who in Europe will do it. Africa is claimed by
everybody, and it belongs to nobody. So far as the Nyassa region is
concerned, while the Portuguese assert their right to the south and
west, scarcely one of them has ever set foot in it: and while the
Germans claim the north and east, their pretension is based neither
upon right of discovery, right of treaty, right of purchase, right of
conquest, nor right of possession, but on the cool audacity of some
chartographer in Berlin, who, in delineating a tract of country
recognized as German by the London Convention of 1886, allowed his
paint-brush to color some tens of thousands of square miles beyond
the latitude assigned. To England it is a small matter politically
who gets Africa. But it is of moment that those who secure the glory
of annexation should not evade the duty of administration. The
present condition of Africa is too critical to permit so wholesale a
system of absentee landlordism; and it is the duty of England, so far
at least as the Nyassa region is concerned, to insist on the various
claimants either being true to their assumed responsibilities or
abandoning a nominal sovereignty.
It is well known,--it is certain,--that neither Portugal nor Germany
will ever administer this region. If they would, the problem would
be solved, and England would gladly welcome the release; the release,
for, although England has never aided this country with a force of
arms, she has for some time known that in some way, direct or
indirect, she ought to do it. This country is, in a special sense,
the _protégé_ of England. Since Livingstone's death the burden of it
has never really left her conscience. The past relation of England
to Nyassa-land, and her duty now, will be apparent from the following
simple facts:--
Lake Nyassa was discovered by David Livingstone. At that time he was
acting as Her Majesty's Consul, and was sent to Africa with a
Government Expedition, which was equipped not to perform an
exceptional and romantic piece of work, but in accordance with a
settled policy on the part of England. "The main object of the
Zambesi Expedition," says Livingstone, "as our instructions from Her
Majesty's Government explicitly stated, was to extend the knowledge
already attained of the geography, and mineral and agricultural
resources, of Eastern and Central Africa; to improve our acquaintance
with the inhabitants, and to endeavor to engage them to apply
themselves to industrial pursuits, and to the cultivation of their
lands, with a view to the production of raw material to be exported
to England in return for British manufactures; and it was hoped that,
by encouraging the natives to occupy themselves in the development of
the resources of the country, a considerable advance might be made
towards the extinction of the slave-trade, as they would not be long
in discovering that the former would eventually be a more certain
source of profit than the latter. The Expedition was sent _in
accordance with the settled policy of the English Government_; and
the Earl of Clarendon being then at the head of the Foreign Office,
the Mission was organized under his immediate care. When a change of
Government ensued we experienced the same generous countenance and
sympathy from the Earl of Malmesbury as we had previously received
from Lord Clarendon; and on the accession of Earl Russell to the high
office he has so long filled we were always favored with equally
ready attention and the same prompt assistance. Thus _the conviction
was produced that our work embodied the principles not of any one
party, but of the hearts of the statesmen and of the people of
England generally._"
Encouraged by this national interest in Africa, the churches of
England and Scotland attempted to follow up the work of Livingstone
in one at least of its aspects, by sending missionaries into the
country. These have already succeeded in establishing themselves in
one district after another, and are daily extending in numbers and
influence.
In order to perpetuate a scarcely less important branch of the
movement initiated by Livingstone,--a department specially
sanctioned, as the above extract shows, by the English
Government--the African Lakes Company was formed in 1878. Its object
was to open up and develop the regions of East Central Africa from
the Zambesi to Tanganyika; to make employments for the native
peoples, to trade with them honestly, to keep out rum, and, so far as
possible, gunpowder and firearms, and to co-operate and strengthen
the hands of the missionary. It has already established twelve
trading stations, manned by a staff of twenty-five Europeans and many
native agents. The _Ilala_ on Lake Nyassa belongs to it; and it has
just placed a new steamer to supersede the _Lady Nyassa_ on the river
Shiré. It has succeeded in starting a flourishing coffee plantation
in the interior, and new sources of wealth are being gradually
introduced. For the first time, on the large scale, it has taught
the natives the meaning and the blessings of work. It has acted, to
some extent, as a check upon the slave-trade; it has prevented
inter-tribal strife, and helped to protect the missionaries in time
of war. The African Lakes Company, in short, modest as is the scale
on which it works, and, necessarily limited as are its opportunities,
has been for years the sole administering hand in this part of
Africa. This Company does not exist for gain;--or exists for gain
only in the sense that commercial soundness is the only solid basis
on which to build up an institution which can permanently benefit
others. A large amount of private capital has been expended by this
Company; yet, during all the years it has carried on its noble
enterprise, it has re-invested in Africa all that it has taken from
it.
All this British capital, all the capital of the Missions, all these
various and not inconsiderable agencies, have been tempted into
Africa largely in the hope that the old policy of England would not
only be continued but extended. England has never in theory departed
from the position she assumed in the days of the Zambesi Expedition.
On the contrary, she has distinctly recognized the relation between
her Government and Africa. She has continued to send out British
Consuls to be the successors of Livingstone in the Nyassa region.
When the first of these, Captain Foote, R.N., died in the Shiré
Highlands in 1884, the English Government immediately sent another to
take his place. But this is the last thing that has been done. The
Consul is there as a protest that England has still her eye on
Africa. But Africa needs more than an eye. And when, as happened
the other day, one of Her Majesty's representatives was under Arab
fire for five days and nights on the shores of Lake Nyassa, this was
brought home to us in such practical fashion as to lead to the hope
that some practical measures will now be taken.
I do not presume to bring forward a formal proposal; but two things
occur to one as feasible, and I shall simply name them. The first is
for England, or Germany, or France, or some one with power and
earnestness, to take a firm and uncompromising stand at Zanzibar.
Zanzibar, as the Arab capital, is one of the keys of the situation,
and any lesson taught here would be learned presently by the whole
Mohammedan following in the country.
The other key to the situation is the vast and splendid water-way in
the heart of Africa--the Upper Shiré, Lake Nyassa, Lake Tanganyika,
and the Great Lakes generally. As a base for military or patrol
operations nothing better could be desired than these great inland
seas. A small steamer upon each of them--or, to begin with, upon
Nyassa and Tanganyika--with an associated depôt or two of armed men
on the higher and healthier plateaux which surround them, would keep
the whole country quiet. Only a trifling force of well-drilled men
would be needed for this purpose. They might be whites, or blacks
and whites; they might be Sikhs or Pathans from India; and the
expense is not to be named considering the magnitude of the
results--the pacification of the entire equatorial region--that would
be achieved. That expense could be borne by the Missions, but it is
not their province to employ the use of force; it could be borne by
the Lakes Company, only they deserve protection from others rather
than that this should be added to the large debt civilization already
owes them; it could be done by the Free Congo State,--and if no one
else is shamed into doing it, this further labor of love may fall
into its hands. But whether alone, or in co-operation with the few
and overburdened capitalists of the country, or in conjunction with
foreign powers, England will be looked to to take the initiative with
this or a similar scheme.
The barriers in the way of Government action are only two, and
neither is insurmountable. The one is Portugal, which owns the
approaches to the country; the other is Germany, which has inland
interests of her own. Whether England could proceed in the face of
these two powers would simply depend on how it was done. As a mere
political move such an occupation of the interior might at once
excite alarm and jealousy. But wearing the aspect of a serious
mission for the good of Africa, instigated not by the Foreign Office
but by the people of England, it is impossible to believe that the
step could either be misunderstood or opposed. It is time the
nations looked upon Africa as something more than a chess-board. And
even if it were but a chess-board, the players on every hand are wise
enough to know that whatever is honestly done to relieve this
suffering continent will react in a hundred ways upon the interests
of all who hold territorial rights within it.
A beginning once made, one might not be unduly sanguine in
anticipating that the meshes of a pacific and civilizing influence
would rapidly spread throughout the country. Already the
missionaries are pioneering everywhere, prepared to slay and do their
part; and asking no more from the rest of the world than a reasonable
guarantee that they should be allowed to live. Already the trading
companies are there, from every nationality, and in every direction
ready to open up the country, but unable to go on with any confidence
or enthusiasm till their isolated interests are linked together and
secured in the presence of a common foe. The territories of the
various colonies are slowly converging upon the heart of Africa, and
to unite them in an informal defensive alliance would not be
impossible. With Emin Pasha occupying the field in the north; with
the African Lakes Company, the British East African Association, and
the German Association, in the east; with the Congo Free State in the
west, and British Bechuanaland in the south, a cordon is already
thrown around the Great Lakes region, which requires only to have its
several parts connected with one another and with central forces on
the Lakes, to secure the peace of Africa.
V.
WANDERINGS ON THE NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU.
A TRAVELLER'S DIARY.
With a glade in the forest for a study, a bale of calico for a table,
and the sun vertical and something under a billion centigrade,
diary-writing in the tropics is more picturesque than inspiring. To
keep a journal, however, next to keeping his scalp, is the one thing
for which the consistent traveller will go through fire and water;
and the dusky native who carries the faded note-books on the march is
taught to regard the sacredness of his office more than if he drove
the car of Juggernaut. The contents of these mysterious note-books,
nevertheless, however precious to those who write them, are, like the
photographs of one's relations, of pallid interest to others, and I
have therefore conscientiously denied myself the joy of exhibiting
such offspring of the wilderness as I possess to my confiding reader.
But as the diary form has advantages of its own, I make no apology at
this stage for transcribing and editing a few rough pages. Better,
perhaps, than by a more ordered narrative, they may help others to
enter into the traveller's life, and to illustrate what the African
traveller sees and hears and does. I shall disregard names, and
consecutive dates, and routes. My object is simply to convey some
impression of how the world wags in a land unstirred by civilization,
and all but untouched by time.
_29th September_.--Left Karongas, at the north end of Lake Nyassa, at
10.30, with a mongrel retinue of seven Mandalla natives, twelve
Bandawé Atongas, six Chingus, and my three faithfuls--Jingo, Moolu,
and Seyid. Total twenty-eight. Not one of my men could speak a word
of English. They belonged to three different tribes and spoke as
many languages; the majority, however, knew something of Chinanja,
the lake language, of which I had also learned a little, so we soon
understood one another. It is always a wise arrangement to have
different tribes in a caravan, for in the event of a strike, and
there are always strikes, there is less chance of concerted action.
Each man carried on his head a portion of my purse--which in this
region consists solely of cloth and beads; while one or two of the
more dependable were honored with the transportation of the tent,
collecting-boxes, provisions, and guns.
The road struck into a banana grove, then through a flat country
fairly well wooded with a variety of trees, including many palms and
a few baobabs. The native huts dotted over this rich flat are the
best I have seen in Africa. The roofs are trimly thatched, and a
rude carving adorns door-post and lintel. After seven miles the
Rukuru is crossed--a fine stream rippling over the sand, with large
flakes of mica tumbling about in the current, and sampling the rocks
of the distant hills. The men laid down their loads, and sprawled
about like crocodiles in the water as I waded across. A few yards
off is a village, where a fire was quickly lit, and the entire
population turned out to watch the white man nibble his lunch. The
consumption at this meal being somewhat slight, and the menu strange
to my audience, I saw that they regarded the white man's effort at
nutrition with feelings of contempt. "The M'sungu eats nothing,"
whispered one, "he must die." The head man presently came asking
beads; but, as I had none unpacked, two stray trinkets and a spoonful
of salt more than satisfied him. On getting the salt he deftly
twisted a leaf into a little bag, and after pouring all the salt into
it, graciously held out his hand to a troop of small boys who crowded
round, and received one lick each of his empty palm. Salt is perhaps
the greatest luxury and the greatest rarity the north-end African can
have, and the avidity with which these young rascals received their
homœopathic allowance proved the instinctiveness of the want. I
have often offered native boys the choice between a pinch of salt and
a knot of sugar, and they never failed to choose the first. For
return-present the chief made over to me two large gourds filled with
curds, of which, of course, I pretended to drink deeply before
passing it on to the men.
Three miles of the same country, with tall bean-plants about, castor
oil, and maize, but no villages in sight. Bananas unusually fine,
and Borassus everywhere. At the tenth or eleventh mile we reached
the fringe of hills bordering the higher lands, and, taking advantage
of a passage about half a mile wide which has been cut by the river,
penetrated the first barrier--a low rounded hill of conglomerate,
fine in texture, and of a dark-red-color. Flanking this for two
miles, we entered a broad oval expansion among the hills, the site
apparently of a former lake. Winding along with the river for a mile
or two more, and passing through a narrow and romantic glen, we
emerged in a second valley, and camped for the night on the banks of
the stream. On the opposite side stood a few native huts, and the
occupants, after much reconnoitring, were induced to exchange some
_ufa_ and sweet potatoes for a little cloth.
_1st October_.--Moolu peered into my tent with the streak of dawn to
announce a catastrophe. Four of the men had run away during the
night. All was going so well yesterday that I flattered myself I was
to be spared this traditional experience--the most exasperating of
all the traveller's woes, for the whole march must be delayed until
fresh recruits are enlisted to carry the deserters' loads. The
delinquents were all Bandawé men. They had no complaint. They stole
nothing. It was a simple case of want of pluck. They were going
into a strange land. The rainy season was coming on. Their loads
were full-weight. So they got homesick and ran. I had three more
Bandawé men in the caravan, and, knowing well that the moment they
heard the news they would go and do likewise, I ordered them to be
told what had happened and then sent to my tent. In a few moments
they appeared; but what to say to them? Their dialect was quite
strange to me, and yet I felt I must impress them somehow. Like the
judge putting on the black cap, I drew my revolver from under my
pillow, and, laying it before me, proceeded to address them.
Beginning with a few general remarks on the weather, I first briefly
sketched the geology of Africa, and then broke into an impassioned
defence of the British Constitution. The three miserable
sinners--they had done nothing in the world--quaked like aspens. I
then followed up my advantage by intoning in a voice of awful
solemnity, the enunciation of the Forty-Seventh Proposition of
Euclid, and then threw my all into a blood-curdling _Quod erat
demonstrandum_. Scene two followed when I was alone; I turned on my
pillow and wept for shame. It was a prodigious piece of rascality,
but I cannot imagine anything else that would have done, and it
succeeded perfectly. These men were to the end the most faithful I
had. They felt thenceforth they owed me their lives; for, according
to African custom, the sins of their fellow-tribesmen should have
been visited upon them with the penalty of death.
Seyid and Moolu scoured the country at once for more carriers, but
met with blank refusals on every side. Many natives passed the camp,
but they seemed in unusual haste, and something of local importance
was evidently going on. We were not long in doubt as to its nature.
It was war. The Angoni were in force behind a neighboring hill, and
had already killed one man. This might have been startling, but I
treated it as a piece of gossip, until suddenly a long string of
armed and painted men appeared in sight and rushed past me at the
double. They kept perfect step, running in single file, their feet
adorned with anklets of rude bells which jingled in time and formed
quite a martial accompaniment. The center man held aloft a small red
and white flag, and each warrior carried a large shield and several
light barbed spears. The regiment was led by a fantastic looking
creature, who played a hideous slogan on a short pan-pipe. This main
body was followed at intervals by groups of twos and threes who had
been hastily summoned from their work, and I must say the whole
turnout looked very like business. The last of the warriors had
scarcely disappeared before another procession of a different sort
set in from the opposite direction. It consisted of the women and
children from the threatened villages farther up the valley. It was
a melting sight. The poor creatures were of all ages and sizes, from
the tottering grandmother to the week old infant. On their heads
they carried a miscellaneous collection of household gods, and even
the little children were burdened with a calabash, a grass-mat, a
couple of fowls, or a handful of sweet-potatoes. Probably the entire
effects of the villages were represented in these loads. Amongst the
fugitives were a few goats and one or two calves, and a troop of boys
brought up the rear driving before them a herd of cows. The poor
creatures quickened their pace as they passed my tent, and eyed me as
furtively as if I and my men had been a detachment from the Angoni
executing a flank movement. The hamlet opposite our camp, across the
river, which had gladdened us the night before with its twinkling
fires, its inhabitants sitting peacefully at their doors or fishing
in the stream, was already deserted--the men to fight, the woman to
flee for their lives they knew not whither. This is a common chapter
in African history. Except among the very largest tribes no man can
call his home his own for a month.
I was amazed at the way my men treated the affair. They lounged
about camp with the most perfect indifference. This was accounted
for by my presence. The mere presence of a white man is considered
an absolute guarantee of safety in remoter Africa. It is not his gun
or his imposing retinue; it is simply himself. He is not mortal, he
is a spirit. Had I not been there, or had I shown the white feather,
my men would have stampeded for Nyassa in a body. I had learned to
understand the feeling so thoroughly that the events of the morning
gave me no concern whatever, and I spent the day collecting in the
usual way.
It was impossible to go on and leave the loads; it was equally
impossible to get carriers at hand. So I despatched Seyid with a
letter to the station on the Lake requesting six or eight natives to
be sent from there. This meant a delay of two or three days at
least, which, with the rains so near, was serious for me.
Made a "fly" for the tent, collected, and read. One only feels the
heat when doing nothing. As the sun climbed to its zenith my men put
up for themselves the most enticing bowers. They were ingeniously
made with interlacing grasses and canes, and densely thatched with
banana leaves.
Tried twice to bake bread, with Jingo and Moolu as assistant cooks.
Both attempts dismal failures, so I had to draw on the biscuit-tins.
I have plenty of fowls, bought yesterday for beads. Maraya down with
fever. One of the carriers, Siamuka, who had been left behind sick,
straggled into camp, looking very ill indeed. Physicked him and gave
him four yards of cloth to wrap himself in. Towards sunset I began
to get anxious for news of battle. The arrival of the armed band
which had passed in the morning soon gratified me. There had been no
battle. There had been no Angoni. It was simply a scare--one of
those false alarms which people in these unsettled circumstances are
constantly liable to. All evening the women and children were
trooping back to their homes; and next morning our friends opposite
were smoking their pipes at the doors again, as if nothing had
happened.
_Tuesday, 2d October_--After morning cocoa had a walk with my hammer
to examine the sections in the valley. Back to a good breakfast,
cooked with all the art of Jingo, the real cook being at Karongas
with the flag of distress. Moolu ill. This is the third man down
with fever since we left the Lake. Bought some ufa and beans.
Dispensed needles, and bent pins for fish-hooks, among the men. Held
a great washing with Jingo. Towards the afternoon the reinforcements
arrived from Karongas. The chief was drunk, it appeared, when my
messenger reached him; but Mr. Munro at the Lake kindly sent me a
number of his own men.
Another of my carriers begged leave to dissolve our partnership, and
produced two youths whom he had beguiled into taking his load. His
plea was that he was in bad odor at Mweni-wanda, and was afraid to go
on. My own impression is that he found the load which he carried--on
his head, like all Africans--was spoiling the cut of his hair. Even
Africa has its exquisites, and this man was the swell all over. By
"all over," I mean, of course, all over his head, for as his hair is
his only clothing, except the bark loin cloth of which the cut cannot
well be varied, he had poured out the whole of his great soul upon
his coiffure. At the best the African's hair is about the length of
a toy-shop poodle's; but vanity can make even a fool creative, and
out of this scanty material and with extraordinary labor he had
compiled a masterpiece. First, heavily greased with ground-nut oil,
it was made up into small-sized balls like black-currants, and then
divided into symmetrical patterns, diamonds, circles, and parterres,
designed with the skill of a landscape-gardener. To protect this
work of art from nightly destruction, this gentleman always carried
with him a pillow of special make. It was constructed of wood, and
dangled conspicuously from his spear-head on the march. He sold it
to me ultimately for a yard of calico--and he certainly would not
sleep after the transaction till he had laid the foundations of
another.
_12th October_.--Got under weigh at early dawn. Much shirking and
dodging among the men for light loads. Formerly sudden and
suspicious fevers used to develop at this critical juncture--by a not
unaccountable coincidence among the men with the heaviest loads; but
my now well-known mixture, compounded of pepper, mustard, cold tea,
citrate of magnesia, Epsom salts, anything else that might be handy,
and a flavoring pinch of cinchona, has miraculously stayed the
epidemic. But I forgive these merry fellows everything for wasting
none of the morning coolness over toilet or breakfast. I need not
say the African never washes in the morning; but, what is of more
importance, he never eats, he rises suddenly from the ground where he
has lain like a log all night, gives himself a shake, shoulders his
load, and is off. Even at the mid-day halt he eats little; but, if
he can get it, will regale himself with a draught of water and a
smoke. This last is a perfunctory performance, and one pipe usually
serves for a dozen men. Each takes a whiff or two from the great
wooden bowl, then passes it to his neighbor, and the pipe seldom
makes a second round.
I often wondered how the natives produced a light when camping by
themselves, and at last resolved to test it. So when the usual
appeal was made to me for "motu," I handed them my vesta-box with a
single match in it. I generally struck the match for them, this
being considered a very daring experiment, and I felt pretty sure
they would make a mess of their one chance. It turned out as I
anticipated, and when they handed back the empty box, I looked as
abstracted and unapproachable as possible. After a little suspense,
one of them slowly drew from the sewn-up monkey skin, which served
for his courier-bag, a small piece of wood about three inches long.
With a spear-head he cut in it a round hole the size of a
threepenny-piece. Placing his spear-blade flat on the ground to
serve as a base, he stretched over it a scrap of bark-cloth torn from
his girdle, and then pinned both down with the perforated piece of
wood, which a second native held firmly in position. Next he
selected from among his arrows a slender stick of very hard wood,
inserted it vertically in the hole, and proceeded to twirl it round
with great velocity between his open palms. In less than half a
minute the tinder was smoking sulkily, and after a few more twirls it
was ready for further treatment by vigorous blowing, when it broke
into active flame. The fire originates, of course, in the small soft
piece of wood, from which sparks fall upon the more inflammable
bark-cloth at the bottom of the hole.
Our daily programme, on the march, was something like this. At the
first streak of dawn my tent was struck. There is no time for a
meal, for the cool early hour is too precious in the tropics to waste
over eating; but a hasty coffee while the loads were packing kept up
the tradition of breakfast. In twenty minutes the men were
marshalled, quarrels about an extra pound weight adjusted, and the
procession started. At the head of the column I usually walked
myself, partly to see the country better, partly to look out for
game, and partly, I suppose, because there was no one else to do it.
Close behind me came my own special valet--a Makololo--carrying my
geological hammer, water-bottle, and loaded rifle. The white man, as
a rule, carries nothing except himself and a revolver, and possibly a
double-awned umbrella, which, with a thick pith helmet, makes
sunstrokes impossible. Next Jingo marched the cook, a plausible
Mananja, who could cook little, except the version of where the
missing victuals went to. After the cook came another gentleman's
gentleman carrying a gun and the medicine chest, and after him the
rank and file, with another gun-bearer looking out for deserters at
the rear. From half-past five I usually trudged on till the sun made
moving torture, about ten or eleven. When I was fortunate enough to
find shade and water there was a long rest till three in the
afternoon, and an anomalous meal, followed by a second march till
sunset. The dreadful part of the day was the interval. Then
observations were made, and specimens collected and arranged, each
man having to fill a collecting-box before sunset. When this was
over there was nothing else to do that it was not too hot to do. It
was too hot to sleep, there was nothing to read, and no one to speak
to; the nearest post-office was a thousand miles off, and the only
amusement was to entertain the native chiefs, who used occasionally
to come with their followers to stare at the white man. These
interviews at first entertained one vastly, but the humbling
performances I had to go through became most intolerable. Think of
having to stand up before a gaping crowd of savages and gravely
button your coat--they had never seen a coat; or, wonder of wonders,
strike a match, or snap a revolver, or set fire to somebody's bark
clothes with a burning-glass. Three or four times a day often I had
to go through these miserable performances, and I have come home with
a new sympathy for sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, the man with the
iron jaw, and all that ilk.
The interview commenced usually with the approach of two or three
terror-stricken slaves, sent by the chief as a preliminary to test
whether or not the white man would eat them. Their presents, native
grains of some kind, being accepted, they concluded I was at least
partly vegetarian, and the great man with his courtiers, armed with
long spears, would advance and kneel down in a circle. A little
speechifying followed, and then my return presents were produced--two
or three yards of twopence-halfpenny calico; and if he was a very
great chief an empty Liebig pot or an old jam tin was also presented
with great ceremony. None of my instruments, I found, at all
interested these people--they were quite beyond them; and I soon
found that in my whole outfit there were not half a dozen things
which conveyed any meaning to them whatever. They did not know
enough even to be amazed. The greatest wonder of all perhaps was the
burning-glass. They had never seen glass before, and thought it was
_mazi_ or water, but why the _mazi_ did not run over when I put it in
my pocket passed all understanding. When the light focused on the
dry grass and set it ablaze their terror knew no bounds. "He is a
mighty spirit!" they cried, "and brings down fire from the sun."
This single remark contains the key to the whole secret of a white
man's influence and power over all uncivilized tribes. Why a white
man, alone and unprotected, can wander among these savage people
without any risk from murder or robbery is a mystery at home. But it
is his moral power, his education, his civilization. To the African
the white man is a supreme being. His commonest acts are miracles;
his clothes, his guns, his cooking utensils are supernatural.
Everywhere his word is law. He can prevent death and war if he but
speak the word. And let a single European settle, with fifty square
miles of heathen round him, and in a short time he will be their
king, their lawgiver, and their judge. I asked my men one day the
question point blank--"Why do you not kill me and take my guns and
clothes and beads?" "Oh," they replied, "we would never kill a
spirit." Their veneration for the white man indeed is sometimes most
affecting. When war is brewing, or pestilence, they kneel before him
and pray to him to avert it; and so much do they believe in his
omnipotence that an unprincipled man by trading on it, by simply
offering pins, or buttons or tacks, or pieces of paper, or anything
English, as charms against death, could almost drain a country of its
ivory--the only native wealth.
The real dangers to a traveller are of a simpler kind. Central
Africa is the finest hunting country in the world. Here are the
elephant, the buffalo, the lion, the leopard, the rhinoceros, the
hippopotamus, the giraffe, the hyæna, the eland, the zebra, and
endless species of small deer and antelope. Then the whole country
is covered with traps to catch these animals--deep pits with a jagged
stake rising up in the middle, the whole roofed over with turf and
grass, so exactly like the forest bed that only the trained eye can
detect their presence. I have found myself walking unconsciously on
a narrow neck between two of these pits, when a couple of steps to
either side would almost certainly have meant death. Snakes too, and
especially the hideous and deadly puff adder, may turn up at any
moment; and in bathing, which one eagerly does at every pool, the
sharpest lookout is scarcely a match for the diabolical craft of the
crocodile.
_13th October_.--Walking through the forest to-day some distance
ahead of my men, I suddenly came upon a rhinoceros. The
creature--the rhino is solitary in his habits--was poking about the
bush with its head down and did not see me, though not ten yards
separated us. My only arms were a geological hammer and a revolver,
so I had simply to lie down and watch him. Presently my gun-bearer
crawled up, but unfortunately by this time the pachyderm had
vanished, and was nowhere to be found. I broke my heart over it at
the moment, though why in the world I should have killed him I do not
in the least know now. In cold blood one resents Mr. Punch's typical
Englishman--"What a heavenly morning! let's go and kill something!"
but in the presence of temptation one feels the veritable savage.
We are now at an elevation of about four thousand feet, and steadily
nearing the equator, although the climate gives little sign of it.
It is a popular mistake that the nearer one goes to the equator the
temperature must necessarily increase. Were this so, Africa, which
is the most tropical continent in the world, would also be the
hottest; while the torrid zone, which occupies so large a portion of
it, would be almost insupportable to the European. On the contrary,
the nearer one goes to the equator in Africa it becomes the cooler.
The reasons for this are twofold--the gradual elevation of the
continent towards the interior, and the increased amount of aqueous
vapor in the air. Central Africa is from three to five thousand feet
above the level of the sea. Now for every three hundred feet of
ascent the thermometer falls one degree. It is immensely cooler,
therefore, in the interior than at the coast; and the equatorial zone
all over the world possesses a climate in every way superior to that
of the borders of the temperate region. At night, in Equatorial
Africa, it is really cold, and one seldom lies down in his tent with
less than a couple of blankets and a warm quilt. The heat of New
York is often greater than that of Central Africa; for while in
America a summer rarely passes without the thermometer reaching three
figures, in the hottest month in Africa my thermometer never
registered more than two on a single occasion--the highest actual
point reached being 96°. Nowhere, indeed, in Africa have I
experienced anything like the heat of a summer in Malta, or even of a
stifling August in Southern Germany or Italy. On the other hand, the
direct rays of the sun are necessarily more powerful in Africa; but
so long as one keeps in the shade--and even a good umbrella suffices
for this--there is nothing in the climate to disturb one's peace of
mind or body. When one really feels the high temperature is when
down with fever; or when fever, unknown to one, is coming on. Then,
indeed, the heat becomes maddening and insupportable; nor has the
victim words to express his feelings towards the glittering ball,
whose daily march across the burnished and veilless zenith brings him
untold agony.
_15th to 22d October_.--This camp is so well situated that I have
spent the week in it. The programme is the same every day. At dawn
Jingo came to my tent with early coffee. Went out with my gun for a
morning stroll, and returned in an hour for breakfast. Thereafter I
sorted the specimens captured the day before, and hung up the fatter
insects to dry in the sun. Routing the ants from the boxes and
provision stores was also an important and vexatious item. Some ants
are so clever that they can break into every thing, and others so
small that they will crawl into anything; and between the clever
ones, and the small ones, and the jam-loving ones, and the
flour-eating ones and the specimen-devouring ones, subsistence, not
to say science, is a serious problem. The only things that have
hitherto baffled them are the geological specimens; but I overhaul
these regularly every morning along with the rest, in terror of one
day finding some precocious creature browsing off my granites. After
these labors I repaired to a natural bower in the dry bed of a shaded
streamlet, where I spent the entire day. Here, even at high noon,
was perfect coolness, and rest, and solitude unutterable. I lay
among birds and beasts and flowers and insects, watching their ways,
and trying to enter into their unknown lives. To watch
uninterruptedly the same few yards of universe unfold its complex
history; to behold the hourly resurrection of new living things, and
miss no change or circumstance, even of its minuter parts; to look at
all, especially the things you have seen before, a hundred times, to
do all with patience and reverence--this is the only way to study
nature.
Towards the afternoon the men began to drop in with their boxes of
insects, each man having to collect a certain number every camp-day.
If sufficient were not brought in the delinquent had to go back to
the bush for more. At five or six I went back to my tent for dinner,
and after an hour over the camp-fire turned in for the night. The
chattering of the men all round the tent usually kept me awake for an
hour or two. Their merriest time is just after sunset, when the
great ufa-feast of the day takes place. The banter between the fires
is kept up till the small hours, and the chief theme of conversation
is always the white man himself--what the whit man did, and what the
white man said, and how the white man held his gun, and everything
else the white man thought, looked, willed, wore, ate, or drank. My
object in being there was an insoluble riddle to them, and for what
witchcraft I collected all the stones and insects was an unending
source of speculation.
That they entered to some extent into one at least of these interests
was proved that very night. I was roused rather late by a
deputation, who informed me that they had just discovered a very
uncommon object crawling on a stick among the firewood. Going out to
the fire and stirring the embers into a blaze, I was shown one of the
most extraordinary insects it has been my lot to look upon. Rather
over two inches in length, the creature lay prone upon a branch,
adroitly shamming death, after the manner of the _Mantidæ_, to which
it obviously belonged. The striking feature was a glittering
coal-black spiral, with a large central spot of the same color,
painted on the middle of the back; the whole resembling a gigantic
eye, staring out from the body, and presenting the most vivid
contrast to the lemon yellows and greens of the rest of the insect.
One naturally sought a mimetic explanation of the singular marking,
and I at once recalled a large fringed lichen which covered many of
the surrounding trees, and of which this whole insect was a most apt
copy. That it was as rare as it was eccentric was evident from the
astonishment of the natives, who declared that they had never seen it
before.
_22d October_.--Water has been scarce for some days, and this morning
our one pool was quite dried up, so I struck camp. Marching
northwest, over an undulating forest country, we came to a small
village, near which was a running stream. The chief, an amiable old
gentleman, after an hour spent in suspicious prospecting, came to see
the show, and propitiated its leading actor with a present of flour.
In return I gave him some cloth and an empty magnesia bottle to hold
his snuff. The native snuff-mull is a cylinder of wood profusely
carved, and, in the absence of a pocket, hangs tied round the neck
with a thong. Snuffing is universal hereabouts.
This is a hotter camp than the last, though the elevation (4500 feet)
is nearly the same. Paid the men their fortnight's wage in cloth,
and as I threw in an extra fathom they held high revelry till far on
in the night.
_24th October_.--Buffalo fever still on. Sallied forth early with
Moolu, a large herd being reported at hand. We struck the trail
after a few miles, but the buffaloes had moved away, passing up a
steep valley to the north and clearing a hill. I followed, but saw
no sign, and after one or two unsuccessful starts gave it up, as the
heat had become terrific. Breakfasted off wild honey, which one of
the natives managed to lay hands on, and sent for the camp to come
up. Moolu went on with one native, T'Shaula--he of the great spear
and the black feathers. They returned about two o'clock announcing
that they had dropped two bull buffaloes, but not being mortally
wounded the quarry had made off. Late in the afternoon two of my men
rushed in saying that one of the wounded buffaloes had attacked two
of their number, one severely, and that assistance was wanted to
carry them back. It seems that five of the men, on hearing Moolu's
report about the wounded buffaloes, and tempted by the thought of
fresh meat, set off without permission to try to secure them. It was
a foolhardy freak, as they had only a spear with them, and a wounded
buffalo bull is the most dangerous animal in Africa. It charges
blindly at anything, and even after receiving its mortal wound has
been known to kill its assailant. The would-be hunters soon overtook
one of the creatures, a huge bull, lying in a hollow, and apparently
_in articulo mortis_. They calmly walked up to it--the maddest thing
in the world--when the brute suddenly roused itself and charged
headlong. They ran for their lives; one was overtaken and trampled
down in a moment; the second was caught up a few yards farther on and
literally impaled on the animal's horns. The first hobbled into camp
little the worse, but the latter was brought in half dead. He had
two frightful wounds, the less serious on the back behind the
shoulder-blade, the other a yawning gash just under the ribs. I
fortunately had a little lint and dressed his wounds as well as I
could, but I thought he would die in my hands. He was quite
delirious, and I ordered a watch all night in case the bleeding
should break out afresh. His nurses unhappily could not take in the
philosophy of this, and I had to turn out every hour to see that they
were not asleep. The native's conception of pain is that it is the
work of an evil spirit, and the approved treatment consists in
blowing upon the wound and suspending a wooden charm from the
patient's neck to exorcise it. All this was duly done now, and the
blowing was repeated at frequent intervals through the night.
_25th October_.--Kacquia conscious, and suffering much. It is
impossible to go on, so the men have rigged up a bower for me on the
banks of a stream near the camp. Read, wrote, physicked right and
left, and received the Chief of Something-or-other. Bribed some of
his retinue to search the district for indiarubber, and bring
specimens of the trees. After many hours' absence they brought me
back two freshly-made balls, but neglected to bring a branch, which
was what I promised to pay them for. From their description I gather
the tree is the Landolphia vine. The method of securing the rubber
is to make incisions in the stem and smear the exuding milky juice
over their arms and necks. After it has dried a little they scrape
it off and roll it up into balls.
An instance of what the native will do for a scrap of meat. Near
camp this morning Moolu pointed out to me a gray lump on the top of a
very high tree, which he assured me was an animal. It was a kind of
lemur, and very good to eat. I had only my Winchester with me, and
the ball ripped up the animal, which fell at once, but leaving an
ounce or two of viscera on the branch. One of the men, Makata,
coming up at the sound of the shot, perceived that the animal was not
all there--it had been literally "cleaned"--immediately started to
climb the tree for the remainder. It was a naked stem for a
considerable height and thicker than himself, but he attacked it at
once native fashion, _i.e._, by walking up the trunk, his clasped
hands grasping the trunk on the opposite side from his doubled-up
body, and literally walking upward on his soles. He soon came down
with the precious mess, and in a few minutes it was cooked and eaten.
To-night I thought my hour was come. Our camp was right in the
forest; it was pitch dark; and I was sitting late over the
smouldering fire with the wounded man. Suddenly a terrific yell rang
out from the forest, and a native rushed straight at me brandishing
his spear and whooping at the pitch of his voice. Sure that it was
an attack, I darted towards the tent for my rifle, and in a second
every man in the camp was huddling in it likewise. Some dashed in
headlong by the door, others under the canvas, until there was not
room to crawl among their bodies. Then followed--nothing. First an
awful silence, then a whispering, then a mighty laughter, and then
the whole party sneaked out of the fort and yelled with merriment.
One of my own men had crept out a few yards for firewood; he had seen
a leopard, and lost control of himself--that was all. It was hard to
say who was most chaffed about it; but I confess I did not realize
before how simple a business it would have been for any one who did
not approve of the white man to exterminate him and his caravan.
_Sunday, 28th October_.--My patient holding on; will now probably
pull through. As he has to be fed on liquids, my own fowls have all
gone in chicken soup. Fowls are now very scarce, and my men, taking
advantage of the high premium and urgent demand, have gone long
distances to get them. They will not supply them to the invalid, but
sell them to me to give him. Wishing to teach them a lesson in
philanthropy, I declined to buy any more on these terms; and after
seeing me go three days dinnerless to give Kacquia his chance of life
they became ashamed of themselves, and handed me all the fowls they
had in a present. This was a prodigious effort for a native, and
proves him capable of better things. The whole camp had been
watching this byplay for a day or two, and the finish did good all
round--more especially as I gave a return present, after a judicious
interval, worth five times what had been given me.
Held the usual service in the evening--a piece of very primitive
Christianity. Moolu, who had learned much from Dr. Laws, undertook
the sermon, and discoursed with great eloquence on the Tower of
Babel. The preceding Sunday he had waxed equally warm over the Rich
Man and Lazarus; and his description of the Rich Man in terms of
native ideas of wealth--"plenty of calico and plenty of beads"--was a
thing to remember. "Mission-blacks," in Natal and at the Cape, are a
byword among the unsympathetic; but I never saw Moolu do an
inconsistent thing. He could neither read nor write; he knew only
some dozen words of English; until seven years ago he had never seen
a white man; but I could trust him with everything I had. He was not
"pious"; he was neither bright nor clever; he was a commonplace
black; but he did his duty and never told a lie. The first night of
our camp, after all had gone to rest, I remember being roused by a
low talking. I looked out of my tent; a flood of moonlight lit up
the forest; and there, kneeling upon the ground, was a little group
of natives, and Moolu in the centre conducting evening prayers.
Every night afterwards this service was repeated, no matter how long
the march was nor how tired the men. I make no comment. But this I
will say--Moolu's life gave him the right to do it. Mission reports
are often said to be valueless; they are less so than anti-mission
reports. I believe in missions, for one thing, because I believe in
Moolu.
But I need not go on with this itinerary. It is very much the same
thing over again. For some time yet you must imagine the curious
procession I have described wandering hither and thither among the
wooded mountains and valleys of the table-land, and going through the
same general programme. You might have seen its chief getting
browner and browner in the tropical sun, his clothes getting raggeder
and raggeder, his collecting-boxes becoming fuller and fuller, and
his desire to get home again growing stronger and stronger. Then you
might have seen the summer end and the tropical rains begin, and the
whole country suddenly clothe itself with living green. And then, as
the season advanced, you might have seen him plodding back to the
Lake, between the attacks of fever working his way down the Shiré and
Zambesi, and so, after many days, greeting the new spring in England.
VI.
THE WHITE ANT.
A THEORY.
A few years ago, under the distinguished patronage of Mr. Darwin, the
animal in vogue with scientific society was the worm. At present the
fashionable animal is the ant. I am sorry, therefore, to have to
begin by confessing that the insect whose praises I propose to sing,
although bearing the honored name, is not entitled to consideration
on account of its fashionable connections, since the white ant, as an
ant, is an impostor. It is, in fact, not an ant at all, but belongs
to a much humbler family--that of the _Termitidæ_--and so far from
ever having been the vogue, this clever but artful creature is hated
and despised by all civilized peoples. Nevertheless, if I mistake
not, there is neither among the true ants, nor among the worms, an
insect which plays a more wonderful or important part in nature.
[Illustration: NEST OF THE WHITE ANT. 1, Male. 2, 4, 5, Neuters.
3, Gravid Female.]
Fully to appreciate the beauty of this function, a glance at an
apparently distant aspect of nature will be necessary as a
preliminary.
When we watch the farmer at work, and think how he has to plough,
harrow, manure, and humor the soil before even one good crop can be
coaxed out of it, we are apt to wonder how nature manages to secure
her crops and yet dispense with all these accessories. The world is
one vast garden, bringing forth crops of the most luxuriant and
varied kind century after century, and millennium after millennium.
Yet the face of nature is nowhere furrowed by the plough, no harrow
disintegrates the clods, no lime and phosphates are strewn upon its
fields, no visible tillage of the soil improves the work on the great
world's farm.
Now, in reality, there cannot be crops, or successions of crops,
without the most thorough agriculture; and when we look more closely
into nature we discover a system of husbandry of the most surprising
kind. Nature does all things unobtrusively; and it is only now that
we are beginning to see the magnitude of these secret agricultural
operations by which she does already all that man would wish to
imitate, and to which his most scientific methods are but clumsy
approximations.
In this great system of natural husbandry nature uses agencies,
implements, and tools of many kinds. There is the disintegrating
frost, that great natural harrow, which bursts asunder the clods by
the expansion during freezing of the moisture imprisoned in their
pores. There is the communistic wind which scatters broadcast over
the fields the finer soil in clouds of summer dust. There is the
rain which washes the humus into the hollows, and scrapes bare the
rocks for further denudation. There is the air which, with its
carbonic acid and oxygen, dissolves and decomposes the stubborn
hills, and manufactures out of them the softest soils of the valley.
And there are the humic acids, generated through decay, which filter
through the ground and manure and enrich the new-made soils.
But this is not all, nor is this enough; to prepare a surface film,
however rich, and to manure the soil beneath, will secure one crop,
but not a succession of crops. There must be a mixture and
transference of these layers, and a continued mixture and
transference, kept up from age to age. The lower layer of soil,
exhausted with bringing forth, must be transferred to the top for
change of air, and there it must lie for a long time, increasing its
substance, and recruiting its strength among the invigorating
elements. The upper film, restored, disintegrated, saturated with
fertility and strength, must next be slowly lowered down again to
where the rootlets are lying in wait for it, deep in the under soil.
Now how is this last change brought about? Man turns up the crust
with the plough, throwing up the exhausted earth, down the refreshed
soil, with infinite toil and patience. And nature does it by natural
ploughmen who, with equal industry, are busy all over the world
reversing the earth's crust, turning it over and over from year to
year, only much more slowly and much more thoroughly, spadeful by
spadeful, foot by foot, and even grain by grain. Before Adam delved
the Garden of Eden these natural agriculturists were at work,
millions and millions of them in every part of the globe, at
different seasons and in different ways, tilling the world's fields.
According to Mr. Darwin, the animal which performs this most
important function in nature is the earthworm. The marvellous series
of observations by which the great naturalist substantiated his
conclusion are too well known for repetition. Mr. Darwin calculates
that on every acre of land in England more than ten tons of dry earth
are passed through the bodies of worms and brought to the surface
every year; and he assures us that the whole soil of the country must
pass and repass through their bodies every few years. Some of this
earth is brought up from a considerable depth beneath the soil, for,
in order to make its subterranean burrow, the animal is compelled to
swallow a certain quantity of earth. It eats its way, in fact, to
the surface, and there voids the material in a little heap. Although
the proper diet of worms is decaying vegetable matter, dragged down
from the surface in the form of leaves and tissues of plants, there
are many occasions on which this source of aliment fails, and the
animal has then to nourish itself by swallowing quantities of earth,
for the sake of the organic substances it contains. In this way the
worm has a twofold inducement to throw up earth. First, to dispose
of the material excavated from its burrow; and, second, to obtain
adequate nourishment in times of famine. "When we behold a wide,
turf-covered expanse," says Mr. Darwin, "we should remember that its
smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to
all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms. It is a
marvellous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould over
any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years,
through the bodies of worms. The plough is one of the most ancient
and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the
land was, in fact, regularly ploughed by earthworms. It may be
doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so
important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly
organized creatures."*
*_Vegetable Mould and Earth Worms_, p. 313.
Now, without denying the very important contribution of the earthworm
in this respect, a truth sufficiently endorsed by the fact that the
most circumstantial of naturalists has devoted a whole book to this
one animal, I would humbly bring forward another claimant to the
honor of being, along with the worm, the agriculturist of nature.
While admitting to the fullest extent the influence of worms in
countries which enjoy a temperate and humid climate, it can scarcely
be allowed that the same influence is exerted, or can possibly be
exerted, in tropical lands. No man was less in danger of taking a
provincial view of nature than Mr. Darwin, and in discussing the
earthworm he has certainly collected evidence from different parts of
the globe. He refers, although sparingly, and with less than his
usual wealth of authorities, to worms being found in Iceland, in
Madagascar, in the United States, Brazil, New South Wales, India, and
Ceylon. But his facts, with regard especially to the influence, on
the large scale, of the worm in warm countries, are few or wholly
wanting. Africa, for instance, the most tropical country in the
world, is not referred to at all; and where the activities of worms
in the tropics are described, the force of the fact is modified by
the statement that these are only exerted during the limited number
of weeks of the rainy season.
[Illustration: A, Male. B, Worker. C, Soldier. D, Fecundated
Female of Termes bellicosus, natural size, surrounded by "Workers."]
The fact is, for the greater portion of the year in the tropics the
worm cannot operate at all. The soil, baked into a brick by the
burning sun, absolutely refuses a passage to this soft and delicate
animal. All the members of the earthworm tribe, it is true, are
natural skewers, and though boring is their supreme function, the
substance of these skewers is not hardened iron, and the pavement of
a tropical forest is quite as intractable for nine months in the year
as are the frost-bound fields to the farmer's ploughshare. During
the brief period of the rainy season worms undoubtedly carry on their
function in some of the moister tropical districts; and in the
sub-tropical regions of South America and India, worms, small and
large, appear with the rains in endless numbers. But on the whole
the tropics proper seem to be poorly supplied with worms. In Central
Africa, though I looked for them often, I never saw a single worm.
Even when the rainy season set in, the closest search failed to
reveal any trace either of them or of their casts. Nevertheless, so
wide is the distribution of this animal, that in the moister regions
even of the equatorial belt one should certainly expect to find it.
But the general fact remains. Whether we consider the comparative
poorness of their development, or the limited period during which
they can operate, the sustained performance of the agricultural
function by worms, over large areas in tropical countries, is
impossible.
Now as this agricultural function can never be dispensed with, it is
more than probable that nature will have there commissioned some
other animal to undertake the task. And there are several other
animals to whom this difficult and laborious duty might be entrusted.
There is the mole, for instance, with its wonderful spade-like feet,
that natural navvy, who shovels the soil about so vigorously, at
home; but against the burnt crust of the tropics even this most
determined of burrowers would surely turn the edge of his nails. The
same remark applies to those curious little geologists the marmots
and skipmunks, which one sees throwing up their tiny heaps of sand
and gravel on the American prairies. And though the torrid zone
boasts of a strong-limbed and almost steel-shod creature, the
ant-bear, his ravages are limited to the destruction of the nests of
ants; and however much this somewhat scarce animal contributes to the
result, we must look in another direction for the true tropical
analogue of the worm.
The animal we are in search of, and which I venture to think equal to
all the necessities of the case, is the termite or white ant. It is
a small insect, with a bloated, yellowish-white body, and a somewhat
large thorax, oblong-shaped, and colored a disagreeable oily brown.
The flabby, tallow-like body makes this insect sufficiently
repulsive, but it is for quite another reason that the white ant is
the worst abused of all living vermin in warm countries. The termite
lives almost exclusively upon wood; and the moment a tree is cut or a
log sawn for any economical purpose, this insect is upon its track.
One may never see the insect, possibly, in the flesh, for it lives
underground; but its ravages confront one at every turn. You build
your house, perhaps, and for a few months fancy you have pitched upon
the one solitary site in the country where there are no white ants.
But one day suddenly the door-post totters, and lintel and rafters
come down together with a crash. You look at a section of the
wrecked limbers, and discover that the whole inside is eaten clean
away. The apparently solid logs of which the rest of the house is
built are now mere cylinders of bark, and through the thickest of
them you could push your little finger. Furniture, tables, chairs,
chests of drawers, everything made of wood, is inevitably attacked,
and in a single night a strong trunk is often riddled through and
through, and turned into matchwood. There is no limit, in fact, to
the depredation by these insects, and they will eat books, or
leather, or cloth, or anything; and in many parts of Africa I believe
if a man lay down to sleep with a wooden leg it would be a heap of
sawdust in the morning. So much feared is this insect now, that no
one in certain parts of India and Africa ever attempts to travel with
such a thing as a wooden trunk. On the Tanganyika plateau I have
camped on ground which was as hard as adamant, and as innocent of
white ants apparently as the pavement of St. Paul's, and wakened next
morning to find a stout wooden box almost gnawed to pieces. Leather
portmanteaus share the same fate, and the only substances which seem
to defy the marauders are iron and tin.
[Illustration: THE MOUNDS OF THE WHITE ANT.]
But what has this to do with earth or with agriculture? The most
important point in the work of the white ant remains to be noted. I
have already said that the white ant is never seen. Why he should
have such a repugnance to being looked at is at first sight a
mystery, seeing that he himself is stone blind. But his coyness is
really due to the desire for self-protection, for the moment his
juicy body shows itself above ground there are a dozen enemies
waiting to devour it. And yet the white ant can never procure any
food until it comes above ground. Nor will it meet the case for the
insect to come to the surface under the shadow of night. Night in
the tropics, so far as animal life is concerned, is as the day. It
is the great feeding time, the great fighting time, the carnival of
the carnivores, and of all beasts, birds, and insects of prey from
the least to the greatest. It is clear then that darkness is no
protection to the white ant; and yet without coming out of the ground
it cannot live. How does it solve the difficulty? It takes the
ground out along with it. I have seen white ants working on the top
of a high tree, and yet they were underground. They took up some of
the ground with them to the tree-top; just as the Esquimaux heap up
snow, building it into the low tunnel-huts in which they live, so the
white ant collects earth, only in this case not from the surface but
from some depth underneath the ground, and plaster it into tunnelled
ways. Occasionally these run along the ground, but more often mount
in endless ramifications to the top of trees, meandering along every
branch and twig, and here and there debouching into large covered
chambers which occupy half the girth of the trunk. Millions of trees
in some districts are thus fantastically plastered over with tubes,
galleries, and chambers of earth, and many pounds weight of subsoil
must be brought up for the mining of even a single tree. The
building material is conveyed by the insects up a central pipe with
which all the galleries communicate, and which at the downward end
connects with a series of subterranean passages leading deep into the
earth. The method of building the tunnels and covered ways is as
follows:--At the foot of a tree the tiniest hole cautiously opens in
the ground close to the bark. A small head appears with a grain of
earth clasped in its jaws. Against the tree-trunk this earth-grain
is deposited, and the head is withdrawn. Presently it reappears with
another grain of earth, this is laid beside the first, rammed tight
against it, and again the builder descends underground for more. The
third grain is not placed against the tree, but against the former
grain; a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth follow, and the plan of the
foundation begins to suggest itself as soon as these are in position.
The stones or grains or pellets of earth are arranged in a
semicircular wall, the termite, now assisted by three or four others,
standing in the middle between the sheltering wall and the tree, and
working briskly with head and mandible to strengthen the position.
The wall in fact forms a small moon-rampart, and as it grows higher
and higher it soon becomes evident that it is going to grow from a
low battlement into a long perpendicular tunnel running up the side
of the tree. The workers, safely ensconced inside, are now carrying
up the structure with great rapidity, disappearing in turn as soon as
they have laid their stone and rushing off to bring up another. The
way in which the building is done is extremely curious, and one could
watch the movement of these wonderful little masons by the hour.
Each stone as it is brought to the top is first of all covered with
mortar. Of course, without this the whole tunnel would crumble into
dust before reaching the height of half an inch; but the termite
pours over the stone a moist sticky secretion, turning the grain
round and round with its mandibles until the whole is covered with
slime. Then it places the stone with great care upon the top of the
wall, works it about vigorously for a moment or two till it is well
jammed into its place, and then starts off instantly for another load.
Peering over the growing wall, one soon discovers one, two, or more
termites of a somewhat larger build, considerably longer and with a
very different arrangement of the parts of the head, and especially
of the mandibles. These important-looking individuals saunter about
the rampart in the most leisurely way, but yet with a certain air of
business, as if perhaps the one was the master of works and the other
the architect. But closer observation suggests that they are in no
wise superintending operations, nor in any immediate way contributing
to the structure, for they take not the slightest notice either of
the workers or the works. They are posted there in fact as sentries,
and there they stand, or promenade about, at the mouth of every
tunnel, like sister Ann, to see if anybody is coming. Sometimes
somebody does come in the shape of another ant--the real ant this
time, not the defenceless _Neuropteron_, but some valiant and belted
knight from the warlike _Formicidæ_. Singly, or in troops, this
rapacious little insect, fearless in its chitinous coat of mail,
charges down the tree-trunk, its antennæ waving defiance to the
enemy, and its cruel mandibles thirsting for termite blood. The
worker white ant is a poor defenceless creature, and blind and
unarmed, would fall an immediate prey to these well-drilled banditti,
who forage about in every tropical forest in unnumbered legion. But
at the critical moment, like Goliath from the Philistines, the
soldier termite advances to the fight. With a few sweeps of its
scythe-like jaws it clears the ground, and while the attacking party
is carrying off its dead, the builders, unconscious of the fray,
quietly continue their work. To every hundred workers in a white ant
colony, which numbers many thousands of individuals, there are
perhaps two of these fighting men. The division of labor here is
very wonderful, and the fact that besides these two specialized forms
there are in every nest two other kinds of the same insect, the kings
and queens, shows the remarkable height to which civilization in
these communities has attained.
But where is this tunnel going to, and what object have the insects
in view in ascending this lofty tree? Thirty feet from the ground,
across innumerable forks, at the end of a long branch, are a few feet
of dead wood. How the ants know it is there, how they know its sap
has dried up, and that it is now fit for the termites' food, is a
mystery. Possibly they do not know, and are only prospecting on the
chance. The fact that they sometimes make straight for the decaying
limb argues in these instances a kind of definite instinct; but, on
the other hand, the fact that in most cases the whole tree, in every
branch and limb, is covered with termite tunnels, would show perhaps
that they work most commonly on speculation, while the number of
abandoned tunnels, ending on a sound branch in a _cul de sac_, proves
how often they must suffer the usual disappointments of all such
adventurers. The extent to which these insects carry on their
tunnelling is quite incredible until one has seen it in nature with
his own eyes. The tunnels are, perhaps, about the thickness of a
small-sized gas-pipe, but there are junctions here and there of large
dimensions, and occasionally patches of earthwork are found embracing
nearly the whole trunk for some feet. The outside of these tunnels,
which are never quite straight, but wander irregularly along stem and
branch, resembles in texture a coarse sandpaper; and the color,
although this naturally varies with the soil, is usually a reddish
brown. The quantity of earth and mud plastered over a single tree is
often enormous; and when one thinks that it is not only an isolated
specimen here and there that is frescoed in this way, but often the
whole of the trees of a forest, some idea will be formed of the
magnitude of the operations of these insects and the extent of their
influence upon the soil which they are thus ceaselessly transporting
from underneath the ground.
In travelling through the great forest of the Rocky Mountains or of
the Western States, the broken branches and fallen trunks strewing
the ground breast-high with all sorts of decaying litter frequently
make locomotion impossible. To attempt to ride through these western
forests, with their meshwork of interlocked branches and decaying
trunks, is often out of the question, and one has to dismount and
drag his horse after him as if he were clambering through a woodyard.
But in an African forest not a fallen branch is seen. One is struck
at first at a certain clean look about the great forests of the
interior, a novel and unaccountable cleanness, as if the forest-bed
was carefully swept and dusted daily by unseen elves. And so,
indeed, it is. Scavengers of a hundred kinds remove decaying animal
matter--from the carcase of a fallen elephant to the broken wing of a
gnat--eating it, or carrying it out of sight, and burying it on the
deodorizing earth. And these countless millions of termites perform
a similar function for the vegetable world, making away with all
plants and trees, all stems, twigs, and tissues, the moment the
finger of decay strikes the signal. Constantly in these woods one
comes across what appear to be sticks and branches and bundles of
faggots, but when closely examined they are seen to be mere casts in
mud. From these hollow tubes, which preserve the original form of
the branch down to the minutest knot or fork, the ligneous tissue is
often entirely removed, while others are met with in all stages of
demolition. Examine the section of an actual specimen, which is not
yet completely destroyed, and from which the mode of attack may be
easily seen. The insects start apparently from two centres. One
company attacks the inner bark, which is the favorite morsel, leaving
the coarse outer bark untouched, or more usually replacing it with
grains of earth, atom by atom, as they eat it away. The inner bark
is gnawed off likewise as they go along, but the woody tissue beneath
is allowed to remain to form a protective sheath for the second
company who begin work at the centre. This second contingent eats
its way outward and onward, leaving a thin tube of the outer wood to
the last, as props to the mine, till they have finished the main
excavation. When a fallen trunk lying upon the ground is the object
of attack, the outer cylinder is frequently left quite intact, and it
is only when one tries to drag it off to his camp-fire that he finds
to his disgust that he is dealing with a mere hollow tube a few lines
in thickness filled up with mud.
[Illustration: NESTS OF WHITE ANTS]
But the works above ground represent only a part of the labors of
these slow-moving but most industrious of creatures. The arboreal
tubes are only the prolongation of a much more elaborate system of
subterranean tunnels, which extend over large areas and mine the
earth sometimes to a depth of many feet or even yards.
The material excavated from these underground galleries and from the
succession of domed chambers--used as nurseries or granaries--to
which they lead, has to be thrown out upon the surface. And it is
from these materials that the huge ant-hills are reared, which form
so distinctive a feature of the African landscape. These heaps and
mounds are so conspicuous that they may be seen for miles, and so
numerous are they and so useful as cover to the sportsman, that
without them in certain districts hunting would be impossible. The
first things, indeed, to strike the traveller in entering the
interior are the mounds of the white ant, now dotting the plain in
groups like a small cemetery, now rising into mounds, singly or in
clusters, each thirty or forty feet in diameter and ten or fifteen in
height; or, again, standing out against the sky like obelisks, their
bare sides carved and fluted into all sorts of fantastic shapes. In
India these ant-heaps seldom attain a height of more than a couple of
feet, but in Central Africa they form veritable hills, and contain
many tons of earth. The brick houses of the Scotch mission-station
on Lake Nyassa have all been built out of a single ants' nest, and
the quarry from which the material has been derived forms a pit
beside the settlement some dozen feet in depth. A supply of bricks,
as large again, could probably still be taken from this convenient
depôt; and the missionaries on Lake Tanganyika and onwards to
Victoria Nyanza have been similarly indebted to the labors of the
termites. In South Africa the Zulus and Kaffirs pave all their huts
with white-ant earth; and during the Boer war our troops in
Praetoria, by scooping out the interior from the smaller
beehive-shaped ant-heaps, and covering the top with clay, constantly
used them as ovens. These ant-heaps may be said to abound over the
whole interior of Africa, and there are several distinct species.
The most peculiar as well as the most ornate, is a small variety from
one to two feet in height, which occurs in myriads along the shores
of Lake Tanganyika. It is built in symmetrical tiers, and resembles
a pile of small rounded hats, one above another, the rims depending
like eaves, and sheltering the body of the hill from rain. To
estimate the amount of earth per acre raised from the water-line of
the subsoil by white ants would not in some districts be an
impossible task; and it would be found, probably, that the quantity
at least equalled that manipulated annually in temperate regions by
the earthworm.
These mounds, however, are more than mere waste-heaps. Like the
corresponding region underground, they are built into a meshwork of
tunnels, galleries, and chambers, where the social interests of the
community are attended to. The most spacious of these chambers,
usually far underground, is very properly allocated to the head of
the society, the queen. The queen-termite is a very rare insect, and
as there are seldom more than one, or at most two, to a colony, and
as the royal apartments are hidden far in the earth, few persons have
ever seen a queen, and indeed most, if they did happen to come across
it, from its very singular appearance, would refuse to believe that
it had any connection with white ants. It possesses, indeed, the
true termite head, but there the resemblance to the other members of
the family stops, for the size of the head bears about the same
proportion to the rest of the body as does the tuft on his Glengarry
bonnet to a six-foot Highlander. The phenomenal corpulence of the
royal body in the case of the queen-termite is possibly due in part
to want of exercise, for once seated upon her throne she never stirs
to the end of her days. She lies there, a large, loathsome,
cylindrical package, two or three inches long, in shape like a
sausage, and as white as a bolster. Her one duty in life is to lay
eggs, and it must be confessed she discharges her function with
complete success, for in a single day her progeny often amounts to
many thousands, and for months this enormous fecundity never
slackens. The body increases slowly in size, and through the
transparent skin the long folded ovary may be seen, with the eggs,
impelled by a peristaltic motion, passing onward for delivery to the
workers who are waiting to carry them to the nurseries where they are
hatched. Assiduous attention, meantime, is paid to the queen by
other workers, who feed her diligently, with much self-denial
stuffing her with morsel after morsel from their own jaws. A guard
of honor in the shape of a few of the larger soldier-ants is also in
attendance as a last and almost unnecessary precaution. In addition,
finally, to the soldiers, workers, and queen, the royal chamber has
also one other inmate--the king. He is a very ordinary-looking
insect, about the same size as the soldiers, but the arrangement of
the parts of the head and body is widely different, and like the
queen he is furnished with eyes.
Let me now attempt to show the way in which the work of the termites
bears upon the natural agriculture and geology of the tropics.
Looking at the question from the large point of view, the general
fact to be noted is, that the soil of the tropics is in a state of
perpetual motion. Instead of an upper crust, moistened to a paste by
the autumn rains, and then baked hard as adamant in the sun; and an
under soil hermetically sealed from the air and light, and
inaccessible to all the natural manures derived from the
decomposition of organic matters--these two layers being eternally
fixed in their relations to one another--we have a slow and continued
transference of the layers always taking place. Not only to cover
their depredations, but to dispose of the earth excavated from the
underground galleries, the termites are constantly transporting the
deeper and exhausted soils to the surface. Thus there is, so to
speak, a constant circulation of earth in the tropics, a ploughing
and harrowing, not furrow by furrow and clod by clod, but pellet by
pellet and grain by grain.
Some idea of the extent to which the underlying earth of the tropical
forests is thus brought to the surface will have been gathered from
the facts already described; but no one who has not seen it with his
own eyes can appreciate the gigantic magnitude of the process.
Occasionally one sees a whole trunk or branch, and sometimes almost
an entire tree, so swathed in red mud that the bark is almost
completely concealed, the tree looking as if it had been taken out
bodily and dipped in some crystallizing solution. It is not only one
tree here and there that exhibits the work of the white ant, but in
many places the whole forest is so colored with dull red tunnels and
patches as to give a distinct tone to the landscape--an effect which,
at a little distance, reminds one of the _abend-roth_ in a pine
forest among the Alps. Some regions are naturally more favorable
than others to the operations of the termites; and to those who have
only seen them at work in India or in the lower districts of Africa
this statement may seem an exaggeration. But on one range of
forest-clad hills on the great plateau between Lake Nyassa and
Tanganyika I have walked for miles through trees, every one of which,
without exception, was ramified, more or less, with tunnels. The
elevation of this locality was about 5000 feet above the sea and the
distance from the equator some 9°; but nowhere else have I seen a
spot where the termites were so completely masters of the situation
as here. If it is the case that in these, the most elevated regions
of Central Africa, the termite colonies attain their maximum
development, the fact is of much interest in connection with the
geological and agricultural function which they seem to serve; for it
is here precisely, before the rivers have gathered volume, that
alluvium is most wanting; it is here that the tiny headwaters of
these same rivers collect the earth for subsequent distribution over
the distant plains and coasts; and though the white ant may itself
have no power, in the first instance, of creating soil, as a denuding
and transporting agent, its ministry can scarcely be exaggerated. If
this is its function in the economy of nature, it is certainly clear
that the insect to which this task is assigned is planted where, of
all places, it can most effectively fulfil the end.
The direct relation of the termites' work to denudation will still
further appear if we try to imagine the effect upon the accumulations
of earth pellets and grains of an ordinary rainy season. For two or
three months in the tropics, though intermittently, the rains lash
the forests and soils with a fury such as we, fortunately, have
little idea of. And though the earthworks, and especially the larger
ant-hills, have marvellous resisting properties, they are not
invulnerable, and must ultimately succumb to denuding agents. The
tunnels, being only required for a temporary purpose, are made
substantial enough only to last the occasion. And in spite of the
natural glue which cements the pellets of earth together, the
structure, as a whole, after a little exposure, becomes extremely
friable, and crumbles to pieces at a touch. When the earth-tubes
crumble into dust in the summer season the debris is scattered over
the country by the wind, and this way tends to increase and refresh
the soil. During the rains, again, it is washed into the rivulets
and borne away to fertilize with new alluvium the distant valleys, or
carried downward to the ocean, where, along the coast line, it "sows
the dust of continents to be." Herodotus, with equal poetic and
scientific truth, describes Egypt as "the gift of the Nile."
Possibly had he lived to-day he might have carried his vision farther
back still, and referred some of it to the labors of the humble
termites in the forest slopes about Victoria Nyanza.
VII.
MIMICRY.
THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS.
Mimicry is imposture in nature. Carlyle in his blackest visions of
"shams and humbugs" among human kind never saw anything so finished
in hypocrisy as the naturalist now finds in every tropical forest.
There are to be seen creatures, not singly, but in tens of thousands,
whose very appearance, down to the minutest spot and wrinkle, is an
affront to truth, whose every attitude is a pose for a purpose, and
whose whole life is a sustained lie. Before these masterpieces of
deception the most ingenious of human impositions are vulgar and
transparent. Fraud is not only the great rule of life in a tropical
forest, but the one condition of it.
Although the extraordinary phenomena of mimicry are now pretty
generally known to science, few workers have yet had the opportunity
of studying them in nature. But no study in natural history depends
more upon observation in the field; for while in the case of a few
mimetic forms--the _Heliconidæ_, for example--the imitated form is
also an insect, and the two specimens may be laid side by side in the
cabinet at home, the great majority of mimetic insects are imitations
of objects in the environment which cannot be brought into comparison
with them in the drawers of a museum. Besides this, it is not only
the form but the behavior of the mimetic insect, its whole habit and
habitat, that have to be considered; so that mere museum
contributions to mimicry are almost useless without the amplest
supplement from the field naturalist. I make no further apology,
therefore, for transcribing here a few notes bearing upon this
subject from journals written during a recent survey of a region in
the heart of Africa--the Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau--which has not yet
been described or visited by any naturalist.
The preliminaries of the subject can be mastered in a moment even by
the uninitiated, and I may therefore begin with a short preface on
animal coloring in general. Mimicry depends on resemblances between
an animal and some other object in its environment of which it is a
practical gain to the creature to be a more or less accurate copy.
The resemblance may be to any object, animate or inanimate. It may
be restricted to color, or it may extend to form, and even to habit;
but of these the first is by far the most important.
Apart from sexual selection, color in animals mainly serves two
functions. It is either "protective" or "warning." The object of
the first is to render the animal inconspicuous, the object of the
second is the opposite--to make it conspicuous. Why it should be an
object with some animals to be palpably exposed will be apparent from
the following familiar instance of "warning" coloration. There are
two great families of butterflies, the _Danaidæ_ and _Acraiedæ_,
which are inedible owing to the presence in their bodies of acrid and
unwholesome juices. Now to swallow one of these creatures--and
birds, monkeys, lizards, and spiders are very fond of
butterflies--would be gratuitous. It would be disappointing to the
eater, who would have to disgorge his prey immediately, and it would
be an unnecessary sacrifice of the subject of the experiment. These
butterflies, therefore, must have their disagreeableness in some way
advertised, and so they dress up with exceptional eccentricity,
distinguishing themselves by loud patterns and brilliant colorings,
so that the bird, the monkey, and the rest can take in the situation
at a glance. These animated danger-signals float serenely about the
forests with the utmost coolness in the broadest daylight,
leisureliness, defiance and self-complacency marking their every
movement, while their duskier brethren have to hurry through the
glades in terror of their lives. For the same reason, well-armed or
stinging insects are always conspicuously ornamented with warning
colors. The expense of eating a wasp, for instance, is too great to
lead to a second investment in the same insect, and wasps therefore
have been rendered as showy as possible so that they may be at once
seen and as carefully avoided. The same law applies to bees,
dragonflies, and other gaudy forms; and it may be taken as a rule
that all gayly-colored insects belong to one or other of these two
classes: that is, that they are either bad eating or bad-stingers.
Now the remarkable fact is that all these brilliant and unwholesome
creatures are closely imitated in outward apparel by other creatures
not themselves protected by acrid juices, but which thus share the
same immunity. That these are cases of mimicry is certain from many
considerations, not the least striking of which is that frequently
one of the sexes is protectively colored and not the other.
The brilliant coloring of poisonous snakes is sometimes set down by
naturalists to "warning," but the details of coloring among reptiles
have never been thoroughly worked out. The difficulty suggests
itself that if the vivid yellows and oranges of some snakes are meant
to warn off dangerous animals, the same conspicuousness would warn
off the animals on which the venomous forms prey. Thus, while being
hunted, a showy skin might be of advantage to the snake; in hunting
it would be an equal disadvantage. But when one watches on the spot
the manner in which snakes really do their hunting, it becomes
probable that the coloring, vivid and peculiar as it is, in most
cases is designed simply to aid concealment. One of the most
beautiful and ornate of all the tropical reptiles is the puff-adder.
This animal, the bite of which is certain death, is from three to
five feet long, and disproportionately thick, being in some parts
almost as thick as the lower part of the thigh. The whole body is
ornamented with strange devices in green, yellow, and black, and
lying in a museum its glittering coils certainly form a most striking
object. But in nature the puff-adder has a very different
background. It is essentially a forest animal, its true habitat
being among the fallen leaves in the deep shade of the trees by the
banks of streams. Now in such a position, at the distance of a foot
or two, its appearance so exactly resembles the forest bed as to be
almost indistinguishable from it. I was once just throwing myself
down under a tree to rest when, stooping to clear the spot, I noticed
a peculiar pattern among the leaves. I started back in horror to
find a puff-adder of the largest size, its thick back only visible,
and its fangs within a few inches of my face as I stooped. It was
lying concealed among fallen leaves so like itself that, but for the
exceptional caution which in African travel becomes a habit, I should
certainly have sat down upon it, and to sit down upon a puff-adder is
to sit down for the last time. I think this coloration in the
puff-adder is more than that of warning, and that this semi-somnolent
attitude is not always the mere attitude of repose. This reptile lay
lengthwise, concealed all but a few inches, among the withered
leaves. Now the peculiarity of the puff-adder is that it strikes
_backward_. Lying on the ground, therefore, it commands as it were
its whole rear, and the moment any part is touched, the head doubles
backward with inconceivable swiftness, and the poison-fangs close
upon their victim. The puff-adder in this way forms a sort of horrid
trap set in the woods which may be altogether unperceived till it
shuts with a sudden spring upon its prey.
But that the main function of coloring is protection may be decided
from the simplest observation of animal life in any part of the
world. Even among the larger animals, which one might suppose
independent of subterfuge and whose appearance anywhere but in their
native haunts suggests a very opposite theory, the harmony of color
with environment is always more or less striking. When we look, for
instance, at the coat of a zebra with its thunder-and-lightning
pattern of black and white stripes, we should think such a
conspicuous object designed to court rather than to elude attention.
But the effect in nature is just the opposite. The black and white
somehow take away the sense of a solid body altogether; the two
colors seem to blend into the most inconspicuous gray, and at close
quarters the effect is as of bars of light seen through the branches
of shrubs. I have found myself in the forest gazing at what I
supposed to be a solitary zebra, its presence betrayed by some motion
due to my approach, and suddenly realized that I was surrounded by an
entire herd which were all invisible until they moved. The
motionlessness of wild game in the field when danger is near is well
known; and every hunter is aware of the difficulty of seeing even the
largest animals though they are just standing in front of him. The
tiger, whose stripes are obviously meant to imitate the reeds of the
jungle in which he lurks, is nowhere found in Africa: but its
beautiful cousin, the leopard, abounds in these forests, and its
spotted pelt probably conveys the same sense of indistinctness as in
the case of the zebra. The hippopotamus seems to find the deep water
of the rivers--where it spends the greater portion of its time--a
sufficient protection; but the crocodile is marvellously concealed by
its knotted mud-colored hide, and it is often quite impossible to
tell at a distance whether the objects lying along the river banks
are alligators or fallen logs.
But by far the most wonderful examples of protective adjustments are
found where the further disguise of form is added to that of color,
and to this only is the term mimicry strictly applicable. The pitch
of intricate perfection to which mimicry has attained in an
undisturbed and unglaciated country like Central Africa is so
marvellous and incredible, that one almost hesitates to utter what
his eyes have seen. Before going to Africa I was of course familiar
with the accounts of mimetic insects to be found in the works of
Bates, Belt, Wallace, and other naturalists; but no description
prepares one in the least for the surprise which awaits him when
first he encounters these species in nature. My introduction to them
occurred on the borders of Lake Shirwa--one of the smaller and less
known of the great African lakes--and I shall record the incident
exactly as I find it in my notes. I had stopped one day among some
tall dry grass to mark a reading of the aneroid, when one of my men
suddenly shouted "Chirombo!" "Chirombo" means an inedible beast of
any kind, and I turned round to see where the animal was. The native
pointed straight at myself. I could see nothing, but he approached,
and pointing close to a wisp of hay which had fallen upon my coat,
repeated "Chirombo!" Believing that it must be some insect among the
hay, I took it in my fingers, looked over it, and told him pointedly
there was no "Chirombo" there. He smiled, and pointing again to the
hay, exclaimed "Moio!"--"It's alive!" The hay itself was the
Chirombo. I do not exaggerate when I say that that wisp of hay was
no more like an insect than my aneroid barometer. I had mentally
resolved never to be taken in by any of these mimetic frauds; I was
incredulous enough to suspect that the descriptions of Wallace and
the others were somewhat highly colored; but I confess to have been
completely stultified and beaten by the very first mimetic form I
met. It was one of that very remarkable family the _Phasmidæ_, but
surely nowhere else in nature could there be such another creature.
Take two inches of dried yellow grass-stalk, such as one might pluck
to run through the stem of a pipe; then take six other pieces nearly
as long and a quarter as thick; bend each in the middle at any angle
you like, stick them in three opposite pairs, and again at any angle
you like, upon the first grass stalk, and you have my Chirombo. When
you catch him, his limbs are twisted about at every angle, as if the
whole were made of one long stalk of the most delicate grass, hinged
in a dozen places, and then gently crushed up into a dishevelled
heap. Having once assumed a position, by a wonderful instinct he
never moves or varies one of his many angles by half a degree. The
way this insect keeps up the delusion is indeed almost as wonderful
as the mimicry itself; you may turn him about and over and over, but
he is mere dried grass, and nothing will induce him to acknowledge
the animal kingdom by the faintest suspicion of spontaneous movement.
All the members of this family have this power of shamming death; but
how such emaciated and juiceless skeletons should ever presume to be
alive is the real mystery. These Phasmidæ look more like ghosts than
living creatures, and so slim are they that, in trying to kill them
for the collecting-box, the strongest squeeze between finger and
thumb makes no more impression upon them than it would upon fine
steel wire, and one has to half-guillotine them against some hard
substance before any little life they have is sacrificed to science.
I examined after this many thousands of Phasmidæ, Mantidæ, and other
mimetic forms, and there is certainly in nature no more curious or
interesting study. These grass-stalk insects live exclusively among
the long grass which occurs in patches all over the forests, and
often reaches a height of eight or ten feet. During three-fourths of
the year it is dried by the sun into a straw-yellow color, and all
the insects are painted to match. Although yellow is the ground tone
of these grasses, they are variegated, and especially towards the
latter half of the year, in two ways. They are either tinged here
and there with red and brown, like the autumn colors at home, or they
are streaked and spotted with black mould or other markings, painted
by the finger of decay. All these appearances are closely imitated
by insects. To complete the deception, some have the antennæ
developed to represent blades of grass, which are often from one to
two inches in length, and stick out from the end of the body, one on
either side, like blades of grass at the end of a stalk. The
favorite attitude of these insects is to clasp a grass-stalk, as if
they were climbing a pole; then the body is compressed against the
stem and held in position by the two fore-limbs, which are extended
in front so as to form one long line with the body, and so mixed up
with the stalk as to be practically part of it. The four other legs
stand out anyhow in rigid spikes, like forks from the grass, while
the antennæ are erected at the top, like blades coming off from a
node, which the button-like head so well resembles. When one of
these insects springs to a new stalk of grass it will at once all but
vanish before your eyes. It remains there perfectly rigid, a
component part of the grass itself, its long legs crooked and
branched exactly like dried hay, the same in color, the same in
fineness, and quite defying detection. These blades, alike with
limbs and body, are variously colored according to season and
habitat. When the grasses are tinged with autumn tints they are the
same; and the colors run through many shades, from the pure bright
red, such as tips the fins of a perch, to the deeper claret colors or
the tawny gold of port. But an even more singular fact remains to be
noted. After the rainy season, when the new grasses spring up with
their vivid color, these withered-grass insects seem all to
disappear. Their color now would be no protection to them, and their
places are taken by others colored as green as the new grass.
Whether these are new insects or only the same in spring toilets I do
not know; but I should think they are a different population
altogether, the cycle of the former generation being, probably,
complete with the end of summer.
Besides the insects which imitate grass, another large class imitate
twigs, sticks, and the smaller branches of shrubs. The commonest of
these is a walking twig, three or four inches long, covered with bark
apparently, and spotted all over with mould like the genuine branch.
The imitation of bark here is one of the most perfect delusions in
nature; the delicate striation and the mould spots are reproduced
exactly, while the segmentation of the body represents node-intervals
with wonderful accuracy. On finding one of these insects I have
often cut a small branch from an adjoining tree and laid the two side
by side for comparison; and when both are partly concealed by the
hands so as to show only the part of the insect's body which is free
from limbs, it is impossible to tell the one from the other. The
very joints of the legs in these forms are knobbed to represent
nodes, and the characteristic attitudes of the insect are all such as
to sustain the deception.
A still more elaborate set of forms are those which represent leaves.
These belong mostly to the Mantis and Locust tribes, and they are
found in all forms, sizes, and colors, mimicking foliage at every
stage of growth, maturity and decay. Some have the leaf stamped on
their broadened wing-cases in vivid green, with veins and midrib
complete, and with curious expansions over the thorax and along all
the limbs to imitate smaller leaves. I have again and again matched
these forms in the forest, not only with the living leaf, but with
crumpled, discolored, and shrivelled specimens, and indeed the
imitations of the crumpled autumn-leaf are even more numerous and
impressive than those of the living form. Lichens, mosses, and fungi
are also constantly taken as models by insects, and there is probably
nothing in the vegetal kingdom, no knot, wart, nut, mould, scale,
bract, thorn, or bark, which has not its living counterpart in some
animal form. Most of the moths, beetles, weevils, and especially the
larval forms, are more or less protected mimetically; and in fact
almost the entire population of the tropics is guilty of personation
in ways known or unknown. The lichen-mimicking insects even go the
length of imitating holes, by means of mirror-like pools of black
irregularly disposed on the back, or interrupting the otherwise
dangerous symmetry of the fringed sides. The philosophy of these
coal-black markings greatly puzzled me for a time. The first I saw
was on a specimen of the singular and rare _Harpax ocellaria_, which
had been thrown on the camp fire clinging to a lichen-covered log,
and so well carried out was the illusion that even the natives were
deceived till the culprit betrayed its quality by erecting its gauzy
wings.
But it would be tedious to recount further the divisive ways of these
arch-deceivers, and I shall only refer to another mimetic form, which
for cool Pharisaism takes the palm from every creeping or flying
thing. I first saw this _menteur à triple ètaye_ on the Tanganyika
plateau. I had lain for a whole week without stirring from one
spot--a boulder in the dried-up bed of a stream, for this is the only
way to find out what really goes on in nature. A canopy of leaves
arched overhead, the home of many birds, and the granite boulders of
the dry stream-bed, and all along the banks, were marked with their
white droppings. One day I was startled to see one of these
droppings move. It was a mere white splash upon the stone, and when
I approached I saw I must be mistaken; the thing was impossible; and
now it was perfectly motionless. But I certainly saw it move, so I
bent down and touched it. It was an animal. Of course it was as
dead as a stone the moment I touched it, but one soon knows these
impostures, and I gave it a minute or two to become alive--hastily
sketching it meantime in case it should vanish through the stone, for
in that land of wonders one really never knows what will happen next.
Here was a bird-dropping suddenly become alive and moving over a
rock; and now it was a bird-dropping again; and yet, like Galileo, I
protest that it moved. It would not come to, and I almost feared I
might be mistaken after all, so I turned it over on its other side.
Now should any sceptic persist that this was a bird-dropping I leave
him to account for a bird-dropping with six legs, a head, and a
segmented body. Righting the creature, which showed no sign of life
through all this ordeal, I withdrew a few paces and watched
developments. It lay motionless on the stone, no legs, no head, no
feelers, nothing to be seen but a flat patch of white--just such a
patch as you could make on the stone in a second with a piece of
chalk. Presently it stirred, and the spot slowly sidled across the
boulder until I caught the impostor and imprisoned him for my
cabinet. I saw in all about a dozen of these insects after this.
They are about half the size of a fourpenny-piece, slightly more oval
than round, and as white as a snowflake. This whiteness is due to a
number of little tufts of delicate down growing out from minute
protuberances all over the back. It is a fringe of similar tufts
round the side that gives the irregular margin so suggestive of a
splash; and the under surface of the body has no protection at all.
The limbs are mere threads, and the motion of the insect is slow and
monotonous, with frequent pauses to impress surrounding nature with
its moribund condition. Now, unless this insect with this color and
habit were protectively colored it simply would not have a chance to
exist. It lies fearlessly exposed on the bare stones during the
brightest hours of the tropical day, a time when almost every other
animal is skulking out of sight. Lying upon all the stones round
about are the genuine droppings of birds; and when one sees the two
together it is difficult to say whether one is most struck with the
originality of the idea, or the extraordinary audacity with which the
_rôle_ is carried out.*
* It is a considerable responsibility to be the sole witness to this
comedy--though I saw it repeated a dozen times subsequently--but,
fortunately for my veracity, I have since learned from Mr. Kirby of
the British Museum that, there is an English beetle, the _Cionus
Blattaria_, the larval form of which "operates" in a precisely
similar way.
It will be apparent from these brief notes that mimicry is not merely
an occasional or exceptional phenomenon, but an integral part of the
economy of nature. It is not a chance relation between a few
objects, but a system so widely authorized that probably the whole
animal kingdom is more or less involved in it; a system, moreover,
which, in the hands of natural selection, must ever increase in
intricacy and beauty. It may also be taken for granted that a scheme
so widespread and so successful is based upon some sound utilitarian
principle. That principle, I should say, was probably its _economy_.
Nature does everything as simply as possible, and with the least
expenditure of material. Now consider the enormous saving of muscle
and nerve, of instinct and energy, secured by making an animal's
lease of life to depend on passivity rather than activity. Instead
of having to run away, the creature has simply to keep still; instead
of having to fight, it has but to hide. No armor is needed, no
powerful muscle, no expanse of wing. A few daubs of color, a little
modelling of thorax and abdomen, a deft turn of antennæ and limb, and
the thing is done.
At the first revelation of all these smart hypocrisies one is
inclined to brand the whole system as cowardly and false. And,
however much the creatures impress you by their cleverness, you never
quite get over the feeling that there is something underhand about
it; something questionable and morally unsound. The evolutionist,
also, is apt to charge mimetic species in general with neglecting the
harmonious development of their physical framework, and by a cheap
and ignoble subterfuge evading the appointed struggle for life. But
is it so? Are the æsthetic elements in nature so far below the
mechanical? Are color and form, quietness and rest, so much less
important than the specialization of single function or excellence in
the arts of war? Is it nothing that, while in some animals the
disguises tend to become more and more perfect, the faculties for
penetrating them, in other animals, must continually increase in
subtlety and power? And, after all, if the least must be said, is it
not better to be a live dog than a dead lion?
VIII.
A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH.
From the work of the various explorers who have penetrated Africa, it
is now certain that the interior of that Continent is occupied by a
vast plateau from 4000 to 5000 feet above the level of the sea. In
five separate regions--in the North-east, in Abyssinia, in the Masai
country, on the Tanganyika plateau, and in the district inland from
Benguela--this plateau attains a height of considerably over 5000
feet; while towards the coast, throughout their entire length, both
east and west, it falls with great uniformity to a lower plateau,
with an elevation of from 1000 to 2000 feet. This lower plateau is
succeeded, also with much uniformity along both coast lines, by
littoral and deltoid plains, with an average breadth from the sea of
about 150 miles.
The section which I am about to describe, entering Africa at the
Zambesi and penetrating inwards to the Tanganyika plateau, traverses
each of these regions in turn--the coast-belt, the lower fringing
table-land, the great general plateau of the country, and the third
or highest elevation of the Tanganyika table-land. To deal
thoroughly with so vast a region in the course of a single
exploration is out of the question; and I only indicate here a few of
the rough results of what was no more than a brief and hasty
reconnaissance.
The first and only geological feature to break the monotony of
mangrove-swamp and low grass plain of the coast-belt is the debris of
an ancient coral-reef, studded with sponges and other organisms.
This reef is exposed on the Qua-qua River, a little above Mogurrumba,
and about fifty miles from the sea. It is of small extent, at no
great height above the present sea-level, and, taken alone, can only
argue for a very inconsiderable elevation of the coast region. Some
twenty miles farther inland, and still only a few yards above
sea-level, an inconspicuous elevation appears, consisting of
sedimentary rocks. This belt is traceable for some distance, both
north and south, and a poor section may be found in the Zambesi
River, a few miles above the grave of Mrs. Livingstone at Shupanga.
The rocks in question, which are only visible when the Zambesi is
very low, consist of a few thin beds of red and yellow sandstones,
with intercalated marly sandstones and fine conglomerates.
Sedimentary rocks, in somewhat similar relation, are found at least
as far north as Mombassa, above Zanzibar, and as far south as the
Cape; and it seems probable that the whole of the plateau of the
interior is fringed by this narrow belt. No organic remains have
been found in this series north of Natal, but the fossils of the Cape
beds may shed some light on its horizon. Associated probably with
these rocks are the great beds of coal which are known to exist some
distance up the river in the neighborhood of Tette.
A short distance above the junction of the River Shiré with the
Zambesi the first hills of the plateau begin almost abruptly. They
occur in irregular isolated masses, mostly of the saddle-back order,
and varying in height from 100 or 200 to 2000 feet. Those I examined
consisted entirely of a very white quartzite--the only quartzite, I
may say, I ever saw in East Central Africa. At the foot of the most
prominent of those hills--that of Morumballa--a hot-spring bubbles
up, which Livingstone has already described in his "Zambesi."
Hot-springs are not uncommon in other parts of the Continent, and
several are to be found on the shores of Lake Nyassa. These are all
of the simplest type, and although the temperature is high they leave
no deposit anywhere to indicate their chemical character.
Two or three days' journey north and west of Morumballa, among the
distant hills which border the valley of the Shiré, Livingstone marks
a spot in his sketch-map where coal is to be found. After examining
the neighborhood with some care, and cross-examining the native
tribes, I conclude that Livingstone must, in this instance, have been
either mistaken or misinformed. A black rock certainly occurs at the
locality named, but after securing specimens of this as well as of
all the dark-colored rocks in the vicinity, I found them to be,
without exception, members of the igneous class. One very dark
diorite was probably the rock which, on a distant view, had been
mistaken for coal, for none of the natives along the whole length of
the lower Shiré had ever heard of "a black rock which burned." Coal,
however, as already mentioned, does certainly occur farther inland on
the Zambesi; while, farther south, the Natal and Transvaal coalfields
are now well known.
While speaking of coal I may best refer here to a small coal-bed
associated with an apparently different series of rocks, and of
special interest from its occurrence in the far interior of the
country. On the western shore of Lake Nyassa, about 10° south
latitude, coal was reported a few years ago by a solitary explorer,
who penetrated that region prospecting for gold in the wake of
Livingstone. The importance of such a discovery--a coal-seam on the
borders of one of the great inland seas of Africa--cannot be
over-estimated; and the late Mr. James Stewart, C.E., who has done
such important work for the geography of Africa, made a special
examination of the spot. From his report to the Royal Geographical
Society I extract the following reference:--
"On the 29th we marched northwards along the coast, reaching, after
three miles, the stream in which is the coal discovered by Mr.
Rhodes. The coal lies in a clay bank, tilted up at an angle of 45°,
dip west. It is laid bare over only some 30 feet, and is about 7
feet thick. It hardly looks as if it were in its original bed. The
coal is broken and thrown about as if it had been brought down by a
landslip, and traces of clay are found in the interstices. Yet the
bed is compact, and full of good coal. I traced it along the
hillside for some 200 yards, and found it cropping out on the surface
here and there. It is 500 feet above the lake-level, and about a
mile and a half from the shore. I lit a good fire with it, which
burned up strongly. The coal softened and threw out gas bubbles, but
gave no gas-jets. It caked slightly, but not so as to impede its
burning."--_Proceedings_, vol. iii. No. 5, p. 264.
I examined this section pretty carefully, and fear I must differ
slightly from Mr. Stewart in his geological and economical view of
the formation. The 7-foot seam described by Stewart is certainly a
deception, the seam being really composed of a series of thin beds of
alternately carbonaceous and argillaceous matter, few of the layers
of coal being more than an inch in thickness. With some of the most
carefully selected specimens I lit a fire, but with disappointing
results. Combustion was slow, and without flame. Although there
were what can only be called _films_ of really good coal here and
there, the mineral, on the whole, seemed of inferior quality, and
useless as a steam-coal. From the general indications of the
locality I should judge that the coal existed only in limited
quantity, while the position of the bed at the top of a rocky gorge
renders the deposit all but inaccessible. On the whole, therefore,
the Lake Nyassa coal, so far as opened up at present, can scarcely be
regarded as having any great economical importance, although the
geological interest of such a mineral in this region is considerable.
Sections of the coal have already been prepared for the microscope,
and Dr. Carruthers of the British Museum has identified the
macrospores of Lycopodaceous plants, which are identical with similar
organisms found in the coal-fields of England.
The Geology of the great African plateaux, so far as my section from
the Lower Shiré to the Tanganyika plateau is any indication of their
general structure, is of such simplicity that it may almost be
dismissed in a sentence. The whole country from the Shiré river, a
hundred miles above its junction with the Zambesi, embracing the
lower and higher central plateaux, the whole Shiré Highlands from the
river to the westward shores of Lake Shirwa, the three hundred miles
of rocky coast fringing the western shore of Lake Nyassa, the plateau
between Nyassa and Tanganyika for at least half its length--with one
unimportant interruption--consists solely of granite and gneiss. The
character and texture of this rock persist with remarkable uniformity
throughout this immense region. The granite, an ordinary gray
granite, composed of white rarely pink orthoclase felspar, the mica
of the biotitic or magnesian variety, rarely muscovite, and neither
fine nor coarse in texture; the gneiss, the same rock foliated. Of
the relation of these gneissose and granitic rocks to one another I
was unable to discover any law. Sometimes the gneiss would persist
over a large area, sometimes the granite; while frequently the two
would alternate perplexingly within a limited area. Mr. Joseph
Thomson's section, drawn inland from Zanzibar and joining mine at the
northern end of Lake Nyassa, and thence onwards by a more easterly
route towards Tanganyika, reveals a somewhat similar petrographical
structure; and, from scattered references in the journals of other
explorers, it is plain that this gneisso-granitic formation occupies
a very large area in the interior of the African Continent.
Associated minerals with these rocks, as far as a very general survey
indicated, were all but wholly wanting. At Zomba, on the Shiré
Highlands, a little tourmaline occurs, but of the precious metals I
could find no trace. Veins of any kind are also rare; and even
pegmatite I encountered in only one instance. Intrusive dykes
throughout the whole area were like-wise absent except in a single
district. This district lies towards the southern border of the
Shiré Highlands, immediately where the plateau rises from the river,
and there the dykes occur pretty numerously. They are seldom more
than a few feet in breadth, and consist of ordinary dolerite or
basalt. The black rock on the Lower Shiré, already mentioned in
connection with Livingstone's supposed discovery of coal, may
possibly be one of these dykes; but that there is any considerable
development of igneous rocks in this immediate locality I should
doubt. Farther up the Zambesi, however, coulees of basalt are met
with at more than one place, conspicuously in the neighborhood of the
Victoria Falls. The only distinct trace of volcanic action
throughout my route appeared towards the extreme northern end of Lake
Nyassa. One is warned beforehand by occasional specimens of pumice
lying about the lake shore as one travels north; but it is not till
the extreme end of the lake is reached that the source is discovered
in the series of low volcanic cones which Thomson has already
described in this locality. The development is apparently local, and
the origin of the cones probably comparatively recent.
Apart from this local development of igneous rocks at the north end
of Lake Nyassa, the only other break in the granitic series
throughout the area traversed by my line of march occurs near the
native village of Karonga, on Lake Nyassa. About a dozen miles from
the north-western lake shore on the route to Tanganyika, after
following the Rukuru river through a defile of granite rocks, I came,
to my great surprise, upon a well-marked series of stratified beds.
At a bend in the river a fine section is exposed. They lie throw
against the granitic rocks, which here show signs of disturbance, and
consist of thin beds of very fine light-gray sandstone, and blue and
gray shales, with an occasional band of gray limestone. By camping
at the spot for some days, and working patiently, I was rewarded with
the discovery of fossils. This is, of course, the main interest of
these beds,--for these are, I believe, the only fossils that have
ever been found in Central Africa. The shale, naturally, yielded the
most productive results, one layer especially being one mass of small
_Lamellibranchiata_. Though so numerous, these fossils are confined
to a single species of the _Tellinidæ_, a family abundantly
represented in tropical seas at the present time, and dating back as
far as the Oolite. Vegetable remains are feebly represented by a few
reeds and grasses. Fish-scales abound; but I was only able, and that
after much labor, to unearth two two or three imperfect specimens of
the fishes themselves. These have been put into the accomplished
hands of Dr. Traquair of Edinburgh, who has been kind enough to
furnish the following account of them:--
EDINBURGH, 23d April, 1888.
DEAR PROFESSOR DRUMMOND--I have carefully examined the six specimens
of fossil fish-remains from Central Africa, which you submitted to
me, and though I certainly would have wished them to have been less
fragmentary, I shall do my best to give an opinion upon them.
No. 1, the largest, is the hinder portion of a fish of moderate size,
showing not only scales, but also the remains of the dorsal, anal,
and caudal fins. The caudal is strongly heterocercal, and was
probably deeply bifurcated, but the rays of the lower lobe are very
badly preserved: only the posterior parts of the dorsal and anal are
seen, nearly opposite each other, and composed of fine, closely
placed, and closely articulated rays. The scales, displaced and
jumbled up, are osseous, thick, and rhomboidal, with a strong blunt
carina on the attached surface, while the exposed part of the
external surface is covered with ganoine, and ornamented with rather
sparsely scattered pits and punctures.
Belonging to the Order Ganoidei, this fish is with equal certainty
referable to the family Palæoniscidæ, but its _genus_ is more a
matter of doubt owing to the fragmentary nature of the specimen.
Judging from the form and thickness of the scales, I should be
inclined to refer it to _Acrolepis_, were it not that the dorsal and
anal fins seem so close to the tail, and so nearly opposite each
other; here, however, it may be remarked that the disturbed state of
the scales affords room for the possibility that the original
relations of the parts may not be perfectly preserved. I have,
however, no doubt that, as a _species_, it is new; and as you have
been the first to bring fossil fishes from those regions of Central
Africa, you will perhaps allow me to name it _Acrolepis_ (?)
_Drummondi_.
No. 2 is a piece of cream-colored limestone, with numerous minute,
scattered, rhombic, striated, ganoid scales, which I cannot venture
to name, though I believe them to be palæoniscid. Associated with
these is a small portion of the margin of a jaw, with numerous minute
sharp conical teeth. But also lying among these minuter relics is a
scale of a much larger size, and clearly belonging to another fish.
It measures 1-4 inch in height by the same in breadth; its shape is
rhomboidal, having an extensive anterior covered area, and a strong
articular spine projecting from the upper margin. The free surface
is brilliantly ganoid, and marked with furrows separating feeble
ridges, which pass rather obliquely downwards and backwards across
the scale, and terminate in eight sharp denticulations of the hinder
margin. A little way off is the impression of the attached surface
of a similar scale, and there are also two interspinous bones,
probably belonging to the same fish.
This is probably also a palæoniscid scale, resembling in shape those
of _Acrolepis_, but it is rather thinner than is usually the case in
this genus. It has also considerable resemblance to some of those
scales from the European Trias, named by Agassiz _Gyrolepis_. Though
it may be rather venturesome to name a species from such slender
material, nevertheless we may, provisionally at least, recognize the
scale as _Acrolepis (?) Africanus_.
Nos. 3 and 4 are small pieces of the same limestone, covered with the
minute striated palæoniscid scales referred to above.
No. 5 is a piece of gray micaceous shale, with scales of yet a fourth
species of palæoniscid fish. One conspicuous scale unfortunately,
like all the rest, seen only from the attached surface, is 1-4 inch
in height by nearly 1-6 in breadth; it is tolerably rectangular in
shape, having a well-developed articular spine and fossette. Part of
the scale is broken away at the anterior margin, the impression
brought into view showing that the covered area is narrow, and
indicating that the free surface is striated with rather sharp ridges
passing obliquely across the scale. The posterior margin is finely
denticulated.
Though this scale is in my opinion specifically, and possibly
generically, distinct from those previously named, the outer surface
not being properly displayed renders it impossible to give a
sufficient diagnosis.
No. 6 is a piece of the same shale, having the clavicle of a small
palaeoniscid fish, which it is, however, impossible to name.--I am,
yours faithfully,
R. H. TRAQUAIR.
These fossiliferous beds seem to occupy a comparatively limited area,
and have a very high dip in a south-easterly direction. At the spot
where my observations were taken they did not extend over more than
half a mile of country, but it is possible that the formation may
persist for a long distance in other directions. Indeed, I traced it
for some miles in the direction in which, some fifty or sixty miles
off, lay the coal already described, and to which it may possibly be
related.
With one or two general remarks upon surface geology and physical
geography I bring this note to a close. First, regarding the Lakes
Nyassa and Shirwa,--there is distinct evidence, and especially in the
case of the latter, that they have formerly occupied a considerably
larger area than at present. Shirwa is an extremely shallow lake;
though the eastern and southern shores are mountainous, it is
suggestive rather of an immense bog than of a deep inland sea. For
many miles before reaching the shore there are signs that one is
traversing the site of a former and larger Shirwa, which may possibly
at one time have been actually connected with the lower extremity of
Lake Nyassa. To substantiate this conclusion, however, will require
more detailed examination of the Shiré Highlands than I was able to
give. The peculiarity of Shirwa is that the water is brackish to the
taste, while that of Nyassa and of the other Central African lakes,
with the exception of Lake Leopold, is fresh. The shallowness of
Shirwa, and the precariousness of its outlet through Lake Cheuta to
the Lujenda, amply account for this difference; for the narrow waters
of Nyassa and Tanganyika are thoroughly drained and profoundly deep.
That Lake Nyassa is also slowly drying up is evident from the most
superficial examination of its southern end. There it has already
left behind a smaller lake--Lake Pomalombé--a considerable expanse of
water, through which the Shiré passes a few miles after emerging from
Lake Nyassa, but already so shallow that nowhere in the dry season
does the depth exceed three fathoms. If the silting up of this lake
continues for a few years it will render this sheet of water, which
commands the entrance to Lake Nyassa, totally unnavigable, and thus
close the magnificent water-highway at present open, with a portage
of seventy miles, from the top of Lake Nyassa to the Indian Ocean at
the mouth of the Zambesi.
Regarding the interesting question of the origin of Lake Nyassa and
its great sister-lakes in the heart of Africa--the Victoria and
Albert Nyanza and Tanganyika--I do not presume to speak. No follower
of Ramsay in his theory of the glacial origin of lakes could desire a
more perfect example of a rock-basin than that of Lake Nyassa. It is
a gigantic trough of granite and gneiss, three hundred miles in
length, nowhere over fifty miles in breadth, and sixteen hundred feet
above the level of the sea, the mountains rising all around it, and
sometimes almost sheer above it, to a farther height of one, two, and
three thousand feet. The high Tanganyika plateau borders it on the
northern shore, and the greatest depth is precisely where the glacial
theory would demand, namely, towards the upper portion of the lake.
On the other hand, the physical geology of the country in which these
other lakes are situated, as well as several features connected with
Lake Nyassa itself, lend no countenance to such a view; and probably
the suggestion of Murchison and other geologists is correct, that all
these lakes, colossal though they still are, are the remnants of a
much vaster expanse of water which once stretched over Central Africa.
The only other point to which I need allude is the subject of
glaciation itself. And I refer to this pointedly, because I have
lately encountered allusions, and in quarters entitling them to
respect, to the presence of glacial phenomena in the Central Lake
district of Africa. I confess that my observations have failed to
confirm these suggestions. It has been my lot to have had perhaps
exceptional opportunities of studying the phenomena of glaciation in
Europe and Northern America, and I have been unable to detect
anywhere in the interior of Africa a solitary indication of glacial
action. In Kaffirland, far to the south, there are features which
one would almost unhesitatingly refer to glaciation; but in East
Central Africa not a vestige of boulder-clay, nor moraine matter, nor
striæ, nor glaciated surface, nor outline, is anywhere traceable.
One would be curious to know to what extent the flora and fauna of
the inland plateau confirm or contradict this negative evidence
against the glaciation of this region.
Finally, the thing about the geology of Africa that strikes one as
especially significant is that throughout this vast area, just
opening up to science, there is nothing new--no unknown force at
work; no rock strange to the petrographer; no pause in denudation; no
formation, texture, or structure to put the law of continuity to
confusion. Rapid radiation, certainly, replaces the effects of frost
in northern lands--and the enormous denudation due to this cause is a
most striking feature of tropical geology. The labors of the worm,
again, in transporting soil in temperate climates are undertaken by
the termite; but here, as elsewhere, every fresh investigation tends
to establish more and more the oneness and simplicity of Nature.
IX.
A POLITICAL WARNING.
When I reached the coast to embark for England after my wanderings in
the interior, the Portuguese authorities at Quilimane presented me
with various official documents, which I was told I must acknowledge
with signatures and money before being permitted to leave Africa.
Having already had to pay certain moneys to Portugal to get into this
country, it was a shock to find that I had also to pay to get out;
but, as no tax could be considered excessive that would facilitate
one's leaving even the least of the Portuguese East African colonies,
I cheerfully counted out the price of my release. Before completing
the conveyance, however, my eye fell on six words prominently
endorsed on one of the documents, which instantly tightened my
purse-strings. The words were, "TAX FOR RESIDING IN THE
INTERIOR"--so much. Now a day or two spent in waiting for a steamer
could scarcely be construed into residence, nor could a strip of
coast-line with propriety be termed the interior, so I ventured to
point out the irrelevancy to the Portuguese official. Waiving the
merely philological question of residence, he went at once to the
root of the matter by informing me that the Portuguese definition of
the word Interior differed materially from that of England. The
Interior, he said, comprised the whole of Africa inland from the
coast-province of Mozambique, and included, among other and larger
possessions, the trifling territories of the Upper Shiré Highlands,
Lake Shirwa, and Lake Nyassa. These last, he assured me, belonged to
Portugal, and it became me, having therein shared the protection of
that ancient flag, to acknowledge the obligation to the extent of so
many hundred Reis.
Though not unprepared for this assumption, the idea of enforcing it
by demanding tribute was so great a novelty that, before discharging
my supposed liabilities, I humbly asked information on the following
points:--1. Did the region described really belong to Portugal? 2.
When and where was this claim recognized by England directly or
indirectly? 3. Where in the Interior, as thus defined, was the
Portuguese flag to be found? And 4. What protection had it ever
given to me or to any other European? The replies to these queries
being evasive, I took it upon myself to correct the history, the
geography, and the politics of the throng of Government officials who
now joined the sederunt by the following statement of facts:--1. The
region described did not belong to Portugal. 2. Its sovereignty had
never been in any way acknowledged by England. 3. The Portuguese
flag was nowhere to be found there, and never had been there. 4. Not
one solitary Portuguese up to that time had ever even set foot in the
country--except one man who was brought in for a few weeks under
English auspices; so that no protection had ever been given, or could
possibly be given, to me or to any one else. These statements were
received in silence, and after much running to and fro among the
officials the representative of John Bull, instead of being dragged
to prison, and his rifle--his only real escort through
Nyassa-land--poinded to pay for his imaginary protection, found
himself bowed off the premises with a discharge in full of his debt
to Portugal, and the unpaid tax-paper still in his pocket.
I recall this incident to introduce in all seriousness the question
interesting so many at the present moment as to the title-deeds of
Equatorial Africa. Why Africa should not belong to the Africans I
have never quite been able to see, but since this Continent is being
rapidly partitioned out among the various European States, it is
well, even in the African interest, to inquire into the nature and
validity of these claims. The two political maps which will be found
at the end of this volume will enable those interested to see the
present situation at a glance, and I shall only further emphasize one
or two points of immediate practical importance.
[Transcriber's note: The two maps mentioned above were missing from
the source book.]
The connection of Portugal with Africa is an old, and--at least it
was at first--an honorable one. The voyages of the Portuguese were
the first to enrich geography with a knowledge of the African coasts,
and so early as 1497 they took possession of the eastern shore by
founding the colony of Mozambique. This rule, however, though
nominally extending from Delagoa Bay to as far north as Cape Delgado,
was confined to two or three isolated points, and nowhere, except on
the Zambesi, affected more than the mere fringe of land bordering the
Indian Ocean. On the Zambesi the Portuguese established stations at
Senna, Tette, and Zumbo, which were used, though on the most limited
scale, as missionary and trading centres; but these are at present
all but abandoned and in the last stages of decrepitude. The right
of Portugal to the lower regions of the Zambesi, notwithstanding its
entire failure to colonize in and govern the country, can never be
disputed by any European Power, though the Landeens, or Zulus, who
occupy the southern bank, not only refuse to acknowledge the claim,
but exact an annual tribute from the Portuguese for their occupation
of the district.
No one has ever attempted to define how far inland the Portuguese
claim, founded on coast-possession, is to be considered good; but
that it cannot include the regions north of the Zambesi--the Shiré
Highlands and Lake Nyassa--is self-evident. These regions were
discovered and explored by Livingstone. They have been occupied
since his time exclusively by British subjects, and colonized
exclusively with British capital. The claim of England,
therefore--though nothing but a moral claim has ever been made--is
founded on the double right of discovery and occupation; and if it
were a question of treaty with the natives, it might possibly be
found on private inquiry that a precaution so obvious had not been
forgotten by those most nearly interested. On the other hand, no
treaties exist with Portugal; there is not a single Portuguese in the
country, and until the other day no Portuguese had even seen it. The
Portuguese boundary-line has always stopped at the confluence with
the Shiré of the river Ruo, and the political barrier erected there
by Chipitula and the river Chiefs has been maintained so rigidly that
no subject of Portugal was ever allowed to pass it from the south.
Instead, therefore, of possessing the Shiré Highlands, that is the
region of all others from which the Portuguese have been most
carefully excluded.
The reason for this enforced exclusion is not far to seek. At first
the Portuguese had too much to do in keeping their always precarious
foothold on the banks of the Zambesi to think of the country that lay
beyond; and when their eyes were at last turned towards it by the
successes of the English, the detestation in which they were by this
time held by the natives--the inevitable result of long years of
tyranny and mismanagement--made it impossible for them to extend an
influence which was known to be disastrous to every native right.
Had the Portuguese done well by the piece of Africa of which they
already assumed the stewardship, no one now would dispute their claim
to as much of the country as they could wisely use. But when even
the natives have had to rise and by force of arms prevent their
expansion, it is impossible that they should be allowed to overflow
into the Highland country--much less to claim it--now that England,
by pacific colonization and missionary work, holds the key to the
hearts and hands of its peoples. By every moral consideration the
Portuguese have themselves forfeited the permission to trespass
farther in Equatorial Africa. They have done nothing for the people
since the day they set foot in it. They have never discouraged, but
rather connived at, the slave-trade; Livingstone himself took the
servant of the Governor of Tette red-handed at the head of a large
slave-gang. They have been at perpetual feud with the native tribes.
They have taught them to drink. Their missions have failed. Their
colonization is not even a name. With such a record in the past, no
pressure surely can be required to make the Government of England
stand firm in its repudiation of a claim which, were it acknowledged,
would destroy the last hope for East Central Africa.
England's stake in this country is immeasurably greater than any
statistics can represent, but a rough estimate of the tangible
English interest will show the necessity of the British Government
doing its utmost at least to conserve what is already there.
The Established Church of Scotland has three ordained missionaries in
the Shiré Highlands, one medical man, a male and a female teacher, a
carpenter, a gardener, and other European and many native agents.
The Free Church of Scotland on Lake Nyassa has four ordained
missionaries--three of whom are doctors--several teachers and
artizans, and many native catechists. The Universities Mission
possesses a steamer on Lake Nyassa, and several missionary agents;
while the African Lakes Company, as already mentioned, has steamers
both on the Shiré and Lake Nyassa, with twelve trading stations
established at intervals throughout the country, and manned by
twenty-five European agents. All these various agencies, and that of
the brothers Buchanan at Zomba, are well equipped with buildings,
implements, roads, plantations, and gardens; and the whole represents
a capital expenditure of not less than £180,000. The well-known
editor of Livingstone's Journals, the Rev. Horace Waller, thus sums
up his account of these English enterprises in his _Title-Deeds to
Nyassa-Land_: "Dotted here and there, from the mangrove swamps at the
Kongoné mouth of the Zambesi to the farthest extremity of Lake
Nyassa, we pass the graves of naval officers, of brave ladies, of a
missionary bishop, of clergymen, Foreign Office representatives,
doctors, scientific men, engineers, and mechanics. All these were
our countrymen: they lie in glorious graves; their careers have been
foundation-stones, and already the edifice rises. British mission
stations are working at high pressure on the Shiré Highlands, and
under various auspices, not only upon the shores of Lake Nyassa, but
on its islands also, and, by desperate choice as it were, in the
towns of the devastating hordes who live on the plateaux on either
side of the lake. Numbers of native Christians owe their knowledge
of the common faith to these efforts; scores of future chiefs are
being instructed in the schools, spread over hundreds of miles;
plantations are being mapped out; commerce is developing by sure and
steady steps; a vigorous company is showing to tribes and nations
that there are more valuable commodities in their land than their
sons and daughters." This is the vision which Livingstone saw, when,
in the last years of his life, he pleaded with his fellow-countrymen
to follow him into Africa. "I have opened the door," he said, "I
leave it to you to see that no one closes it after me."
The urgency of the question of Portuguese as against British
supremacy in Equatorial Africa must not blind us, however, to another
and scarcely less important point--the general European, and
especially the recent German, invasion of Africa. The Germans are
good, though impecunious colonists, but it cannot be said that they
or any of the other European nations are as alive to the moral
responsibilities of administration among native tribes as England
would desire. And though they are all freely entitled to whatever
lands in Africa they may legitimately secure, it is advisable for all
concerned that these acquisitions should be clearly defined and
established in international law, in order that the various Powers,
the various trading-companies, and the various missions, may know
exactly where they stand. The almost hopeless entanglement of the
Foreign Powers in Africa at present may be seen from the following
political "section," which represents the order of occupation along
the Atlantic seaboard from opposite Gibraltar to the Cape:--
POLITICAL "SECTION" OF WESTERN AFRICA.
Spain . . . Morocco.
France . . . "
Spain . . . Opposite the Canaries.
France . . . French Senegambia.
Britain . . . British Senegambia
France . . . French "
Britain . . . British "
Portugal . . . Portuguese "
France . . .
Britain . . . Sierra Leone.
Liberia . . . Republic of Liberia.
France . . . Gold Coast.
England . . . Gold Coast.
France . . . Dahomey.
Unappropriated . . . "
England . . . Niger.
Germany . . . Cameroons.
French . . . French Congo.
Portuguese . . . Portuguese Congo.
International . . Congo.
Portuguese . . . Angola.
Portuguese . . . Benguela.
Germany . . . Angra Pequena.
England . . . Walvisch Bay.
Germany . . . Orange River.
England . . . Cape of Good Hope.
These several possessions on the western coast have at least the
advantage of being to some extent defined, but those on the east, and
especially as regards their inland limits, are in a complete state of
chaos. It seems hopeless to propose it, but what is really required
is an International Conference to overhaul title-deeds, adjust
boundary-lines, delimit territories, mark off states, protectorates,
lands held by companies, and spheres of influence. England's
interest in this must be largely a moral one. Her ambitions in the
matter of new territories are long ago satisfied. But there will be
certain conflict some day if the portioning of Africa is not more
closely watched than it is at present.
As an example of the complacent way in which vast tracts in Africa
are being appropriated, glance for a moment at the recent inroads of
the Germans. On the faith of private treaties, and of an agreement
with Portugal, Germany has recently staked off a region in East
Central Africa stretching from the boundaries of the Congo Free State
to the Indian Ocean, and embracing an area considerably larger than
the German Empire. To a portion only of this region--the boundaries
of which, contrasted with that arbitrarily claimed in addition, will
be apparent from a comparison of the maps--have the Germans procured
a title; and the steps by which this has been attained afford an
admirable illustration of modern methods of land-transfer in Africa.
What happened was this:--
Four or five years ago Dr. Karl Peters concluded treaties with the
native chiefs of Useguha, Ukami, Nguru and Usagara, by which he
acquired these territories from the Society for German Colonization.
The late Sultan of Zanzibar attempted to remonstrate, but meantime an
imperial "Schutzbrief" had been secured from Berlin, and a German
fleet arrived at Zanzibar prepared to enforce it. Britain appealed
to Germany on the subject, and a Delimitation Commission was
appointed, which met in London. An agreement was come to, signed by
Lord Iddesleigh on 29th October, 1886, and duly given effect to. The
terms of this Anglo-German Convention have been recently made public
in a well-informed article by Mr. A. Silva White (_Scottish
Geographical Magazine_, March, 1888), to which I am indebted for some
of the above facts, and the abstract may be given here intact, as
political knowledge of Africa is not only deficient, but materials
for improving it are all but inaccessible. In view, moreover, of the
spirit of acquisitiveness which is abroad among the nations of
Europe, and of recent attempts on the part of Germany to claim more
than her title allows, the exact terms of this contract ought to be
widely known:--
I. Both Powers recognize the sovereignty of the Sultan of Zanzibar
over the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, Lamu and Mafia, as also over
those small islands lying within a circuit of twelve nautical miles
of Zanzibar. Both Powers also recognize as the Sultan's possessions
on the mainland an uninterrupted coast-line from the mouth of the
Miningani River at the entrance of the bay of Tunghi (south of Cape
Delgado) as far as Kipini (south of Wito). This line encloses a
coast of ten nautical miles inland for the whole distance. The
northern boundary includes Kau; north of Kipini, both Powers
recognize as belonging to the Sultan of Zanzibar the stations of
Kisimayu, Brava, Merka, and Makdishu (Magadoxo), each with a land
circuit of ten nautical miles, and Warsheikli with a land circuit of
five nautical miles.
II. Great Britain engages herself to support those negotiations of
Germany with the Sultan which have for their object the farming out
(_Verpachtung_) of the customs in the harbors of Dar-es-Salaam and
Pangani to the German East African Association, on the payment by the
Association to the Sultan of an annual guaranteed sum of money.
III. Both Powers agree to undertake a delimitation of their
respective spheres of influence in this portion of the East African
Continent. This territory shall be considered as bounded on the
south by the Rovuma River, and on the north by a line, commencing
from the mouth of the Tana River, following the course of this river
or its tributaries, to the intersection of the Equator with the 38th
degree of east longitude, and from thence continued in a straight
line to the intersection of the 1st degree of north latitude with the
37th degree of east longitude. The line of demarcation shall start
from the mouth of the river Wanga, or Umbe, and follow a straight
course to Lake Jipe (south-east of Kilimanjaro), along the eastern
shore and round the northern shore of the lake, across the river
Lumi, passing between the territories of Taveta and Chagga, and then
along the northern slope of the Kilimanjaro range and continued in a
straight line to the point on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria
Nyanza which is intersected by the 1st degree of south latitude.
Great Britain engages herself to make no territorial acquisitions, to
accept no Protectorates, and not to compete with the spread of German
influence to the south of this line, whilst Germany engages herself
to observe a similar abstinence in the territories to the north of
this line.
IV. Great Britain will use her influence to promote the conclusion of
a friendly agreement concerning the existing claims of the Sultan of
Zanzibar and the German East African Association, on the Kilimanjaro
territory.
V. Both Powers recognize as belonging to Wito the coast stretching
from the north of Kipini to the north end of Man da Bay.
VI. Great Britain and Germany will conjointly call upon the Sultan of
Zanzibar to recognize the General Act of the Berlin Conference, save
and except the existing rights of His Highness as laid down in Art.
I. of the Act.
VII. Germany binds herself to become a party to the Note signed by
Great Britain and France on 10th March, 1862, in regard to the
recognition of the independence of Zanzibar.
This is the only document which can have any validity, and such
German claims--outside the limit here assigned--as are represented on
the newer German maps, are to be treated as mere chartographical
flourishes. Encouraged, however, by this success in securing
territory in Africa, and without stopping to use or even to proclaim
their protectorate over more than a fraction of the petty states
comprised within it, the Germans instantly despatched expedition
after expedition to secure further conquest in the remoter and
unappropriated districts. Dr. Karl Peters himself led one large
expedition; Dr. Jühlke negotiated agreements with the tribes on the
distant Somal coast; and other explorers brought back rare and heavy
spoil--on paper--to Berlin. So the swallowing up of Africa goes on.
The slices cut are daily becoming bigger, and in a few years more not
a crumb of the loaf will remain for those who own it now. The poor
Sultan of Zanzibar, who used to boast himself lord of the whole
interior, woke up, after the London Convention, to find that his
African kingdom consisted of a ten-mile-wide strip of coast-line,
extending from Kipini to the Miningani River. Even this has already
been sold or leased to the English and Germans, and nothing now
remains to His Highness but a few small islands.
Since turning her attention towards Africa, Germany has not only
looked well after new territory, but seized the opportunity to
inspect and readjust the title-deeds to her other African property.
We find a new treaty concluded in 1885 between her and the British
Protectorate in the Niger regarding the Cameroons; another towards
the close of the same year with France on the same subject, and
securing rights to Malimba and Great Batonga; and a third with
Portugal in 1887, defining, in the interest of the latter, the
boundaries of Angola, and ceding to Germany, as a _quid-pro-quo_, an
acknowledgment of the claim of the Germans--which, of course, England
repudiates--to East Central Africa from the coast to the south end of
Tanganyika and Lake Nyassa, as far as the latitude of the Rovuma.
These facts prove the genuine political activity of at least one
great European power, and offer a precedent to England, which, in one
respect at least, she would do well to copy. Her title-deeds, and
those of certain districts in which she is concerned, are not in such
perfect order as to justify the apathy which exists at present, and
her interests in the country are now too serious to be the prey of
unchallenged ambitions, or left at the mercy of any casual turn of
the wheel of politics.
Thanks, partly, to the recent seizure by Portugal of the little
Zambesi steamer belonging to the African Lakes company--on the plea
that vessels trading on Portuguese waters must be owned by Portuguese
subjects, and fly the Portuguese flag--and to influential deputations
to head-quarters on the part of the various Missions, the Foreign
Office is beginning to be alive to the state of affairs in East
Central Africa. The annexation of Matabeleland will be a chief item
on the programme with which it is hoped the Government will shortly
surprise us; but, what is of greater significance, it will probably
include a declaration of the Zambesi as an open river, and the
abolition or serious restriction of the present customs tariff.
Important as these things are, however, they affect but slightly the
two supreme English interests in East Central Africa--the suppression
of the slave-trade and the various missionary and industrial
enterprises. The most eager among the supporters of these higher
interests have never ventured to press upon Government anything so
pronounced as that England should declare a Protectorate over the
Upper Shiré and Nyassa districts; but they do contend, and with every
reason, for the delimitation of part of this region as a "Sphere of
British Influence."
Granting even that the shadowy claims of Germany and Portugal to the
eastern shore of Lake Nyassa are to be respected, there remain the
whole western coast of the Lake, and the regions of the Upper Shiré
which are reached directly from the waters of the Zambesi without
trespassing on the soil of any nation. These regions are not even
claimed at present by any one, while by every right of discovery and
occupation--by every right, in fact, except that of formal
acknowledgment--they are already British. It will be an oversight
most culpable and inexcusable if this great theatre of British
missionary and trading activity should be allowed to be picked up by
any passing traveller, or become the property of whatever European
power had sufficient effrontery at this late day to wave its flag
over it. The thriving settlements, the schools and churches, the
roads and trading-stations, of Western Nyassa-land are English. And
yet it is neither asked that they should be claimed by England,
annexed by England, nor protected by England. Those whose
inspirations and whose lives have created this oasis in the desert,
plead only that no intruder now should be allowed to undo their labor
or idly reap its fruits. Here is one spot, at least, on the Dark
Continent, which is being kept pure and clean. It is now within the
power of the English Government to mark it off before the world as
henceforth sacred ground. To-morrow, it may be too late.
X.
A METEOROLOGICAL NOTE.
The Lake Nyassa region of Africa knows only two seasons--the rainy
and the dry. The former begins with great regularity on the opening
days of December, and closes towards the end of April; while during
the dry season, which follows for the next six months, the sun is
almost never darkened with a cloud. At Blantyre, on the Shiré
Highlands, the rainfall averages fifty inches; at Bandawé, on Lake
Nyassa, a register of eighty-six inches is counted a somewhat dryish
season.
The barometer in tropical countries is much more conservative of
change than in northern latitudes, and the annual variation at Lake
Nyassa is only about half an inch--or from 28.20 inches in November
to 28.70 inches in June. The diurnal variation, according to Mr.
Stewart, is rarely more than twenty-hundredths of an inch.
The average temperature for the year at Blantyre, where the elevation
is about three thousand feet above sea-level, is 50° Fahr., but the
mercury has been known to stand ten degrees lower, and on one
exceptional occasion it fell 2° below freezing point. At Lake
Nyassa, half the height of Blantyre, 85° Fahr. is a common figure for
mid-day in the hottest month (November) in the year, while the
average night-temperature of the coldest month (May) is about 60°.
The lowest registered temperature on the Lake has been 54°, and the
highest--though this is extremely rare--100° Fahr. When the
Livingstonia Mission occupied the promontory of Cape Maclear, at the
southern end of Nyassa, in 1880, one of the then staff, Mr. Harkess,
had the energy to keep a systematic record of the temperature, and I
am indebted to his notebook for the following table. The figures
represent observations taken at 6 A.M., 12 noon, and 6 P.M. A dash
indicates that the observation was omitted for the hour
corresponding. The wet bulb reads on an average 10 degrees lower.
TABLE OF TEMPERATURES AT LAKE NYASSA.
May June July Aug. Sept.
1 70 62 64 67 68
80 75 73 74 79
75 76 74 73 75
2 -- 60 64 68 69
77 78 74 -- 79
-- 73 -- 74 75
3 67 65 62 65 66
76 78 74 -- 75
76 74 70 -- 74
4 68½ 64 -- 62 71
79 71 73 -- 77
78 70 -- -- 79
5 68 64 63 76 --
79 74 -- -- --
76 74 71 -- --
6 -- 64 64 70 65
75½ 77 72 77 81
75 76 74 -- 77
7 66 67 64 61 72
79 78 71 79 80
75 75 71 -- 77
8 65 66 64 -- 70
74 74 -- -- 80
74 74 71 -- 81
9 -- 68 65 62 70
77 76 75 79 81
-- 73 73 -- 77
10 67 68 66 61 --
75 75 -- 81 80
74 73 71 -- 77
11 69 66 -- 62 70
75 76 76 79 79
-- 75 73 -- 79
12 -- 66 69 65 --
75 75 77 81 --
71 72 -- 76 --
13 65 -- 70 72
76 73 80 79
74 -- 77 78
14 67 63 68 71
73 74 77 81
71 -- 75 78
15 68 64 -- 66 72
76 74 -- -- 75
75 72 76 -- 77
16 71 64 68 67 --
77 74 79 75 79
75 70 78 73 77
17 68 64 65 -- --
78 74 77 -- --
77 72 -- 76 76
18 72 71 68 68 73
80 74 75 75 78
78 72 76 72 77
19 65 64 69 -- --
74 -- 77 75 --
76 77 79 74 --
20 63 -- 67 68 75
74 76 76 -- 82
76 74 74 75 80
21 67 65 64 64 71
75 72 75 -- 85
75 68 75 75 78
22 70 63 67 -- 72
75 66 75 78 81
-- 65 76 75 79
23 58 65 -- 70
67 77 79 82
70 74 77 78
24 -- 62 64 68 73
76 -- 76 69 82
76 -- 74 66 81
25 67 61 66 63 74
77 -- 74 75 --
75 -- 75 71 78
26 67 63 67 64 --
75 75 79 72 --
75 -- 76 73 --
27 69 -- 65 65 73
77 72 74 77 84
74 -- 71 77 82
28 70 -- 65 70 73
78 72 76 79 81
77 -- 74 78 79
29 68 63 65 -- 68
80 71 72 76 82
77 72 75 -- 80
30 -- 64 63 67 74
75 74 78 79 82
76 -- 75 77 80
31 67 65 66
74 76 79
74 76 83
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