Immediately beyond this grim and grisly reminiscence are the neat dwelling-house and the store of the Honourable Mr. Sybille Boyle, so named from a ship and from her captain, R.N., who served in the preventive squadron about 1824. He is an unofficial member of Council and a marked exception to the rule of the ‘Liberateds.’ Everybody has a good word to say of him. The establishment is the regular colonial, where you can buy anything between a needle and a sheet-anchor. Bottled ale is not wanting, and thus steamer-passengers learn to congregate in the back parlour.
We then walked to the top of Gloucester Street, expecting to see the Duke of Edinburgh’s memorial. I left it an arch of sticks and timber spanning this main cross-line, which leads to Government House. The temporary was to be supplanted by a permanent marble _arc de triomphe_, commemorating the auspicious occasion when the black colony first looked upon a live white Royal Highness. At once 700_l_. was subscribed, and only 800_l_. was wanting; but all those interested in the matter died, and the 350_l_. which remained in the chest was, I believe, transferred to the ‘Willyfoss.’ The august day is still kept as a public holiday, for the people are, after their fashion, loyal-mouthed in the extreme. But the memorial is clean forgotten, and men stare if you ask about it. Half-way up the street is the post-office, whose white chief is not a whit more civil than the negro head in 1862.
Upon this highly interesting spot we stood awhile to note the peculiarities of the place and its position. The soil is a loose clay, deep-red or brown, impregnated with iron and, where unclothed with humus, cold and infertile, as the spontaneous aloe shows. The subsoil is laterite, also highly ferruginous. Soft and working well with the axe while it retains the quarry-water, it soon hardens by exposure; and, thus weathered, it forms the best and ugliest of the local building materials. Embedded in the earth’s surface are blocks and boulders apparently erratic, dislodged or washed down from the upper heights, where similar masses are seen. Many are scattered, as if by an eruption; others lie in slab or dome shape upon the shore. The shape is usually spheroidal, and the material hypersthene (a hard and close-grained bluish granite) or diorite, greenstone-trap blackened by sun and rain. In the few cuttings of the higher levels I afterwards remarked that detached ‘hardheads’ are puddinged into the friable laterite; but I nowhere found the granitic floor-rock protruding above ground. The boulders are treated by ditching and surrounding with a hot fire for forty-eight hours; cold water, not vinegar, is then poured upon them, and causes the heated material suddenly to contract and fracture, when it can easily be removed. Magnetic iron also occurs, and specimens have been sent to England; but veins have not yet been discovered.
Our walk had furnished us with a tolerable idea of ‘the city’s’ plan, without referring to the printed affair. Fronting north with westing, it is divided into squares, blocks, and insulae, after the fashion of a chessboard. This is one of the oldest as well as the newest mode of distributions. The temples of the classical gods, being centrally situated, required for general view broad, straight approaches. From Washington to Buenos Ayres the modern cities of the New World have reverted to this ancient system without other reason but a love of regularity and simplicity. Here the longer streets flank the sea and the shorter run at right angles up the inner slopes. Both are bright red lines worn in the vegetation between the houses. The ribbons of green are the American or Bahama grass; fine, silky, and creeping along the ground, it is used to stuff mattresses, and it forms a good substitute for turf. When first imported it was neglected, cut away, and nearly killed out; now it is encouraged, because its velvety plots relieve the glaring red surface, it keeps off the ‘bush,’ and it clears the surface of all other vegetation. Looking upon the city below, we were surprised to see the dilapidation of the tenements. Some have tumbled down; others were tumbling down; many of those standing were lumber or board shanties called ‘quarter-frames’ and ‘ground-floors;’ sundry large piles rose grisly and fire-charred, and the few good houses looked quite modern. But what can be expected in a place where Europeans never expect to outstay the second year, and where Africans, who never yet worked without compulsion, cannot legally be compelled to work?
We then walked up to Government House, the Fort Thornton of old charts, whose roof, seen from the sea, barely tops the dense curtain of tree and shrubbery that girds and hangs around it. Passing under a cool and shady avenue of mangoes and figs, and the archway, guarded by a porter’s lodge and a detachment of the three hundred local police, we came in sight of the large, rambling residence, built piecemeal, like many an English country-house. There is little to recommend it save the fine view of the sea and the surrounding shrubbery-ground. I can well understand how, with the immense variety of flower and fruit suddenly presented to his eyes, the gentleman fresh from England required six months to recover the free and full use of all his senses and faculties.
A policeman–no longer a Zouave of the West Indian corps–took in our cards, and we introduced ourselves to Captain A. E. Havelock, ‘Governor-in-Chief of Sierra Leone and the Gambia.’ He is No. 47 since Captain Day, R.N., first ruled in A.D. 1803. I had much to say to him about sundry of his predecessors. Captain Havelock, who dates only from 1881, has the reputation of being slightly ‘black.’ The Neri and the Bianchi factions here represent the Buffs and Blues of a land further north. He is yet in the heyday of popularity, when, in the consecrated phrase, the ruler ‘gains golden opinions.’ But colonial judgments are fickle, and mostly in extremes. After this smiling season the weather lowers, the storm breaks, and all is elemental rage, when from being a manner of demigod the unhappy ruler gradually becomes one of the ‘meanest and basest of men.’ _Absit omen!_
We returned at sunset to Government House and spent a pleasant evening. The ‘smokes’ had vanished, and with them the frowse and homeliness of morning. The sun, with rays of lilac red, set over a panorama of townlet, land, and sea, to which distance added many a charm. Mingling afar with the misty horizon, the nearer waters threw out, by their golden and silvery sheen, the headlands, capes, and tongues stretching in long perspective below, while the Sugarloaf, father of mountains, rose in solitary grandeur high above his subject hills. On the nearer slope of Signal Hill we saw the first of the destructive bush-burnings. They are like prairie-fires in these lands, and sometimes they gird Freetown with a wall of flame. Complexion is all in all to Sa Leone, and she showed for a few moments a truly beautiful prospect.
The Governor has had the courage to bring out Mrs. Havelock, and she has had the courage to stand firm against a rainy season. The climate is simply the worst on the West Coast, despite the active measures of sanitation lately taken, the Department of Public Health, the ordinances of the Colonial Government in 1879, and the excellent water with which the station is now provided. On a clear sunny day the charnel-house, I repeat, is lovely, _mais c’est la mort_; it is the terrible beauty of death. Mrs. Melville says, with full truth, ‘I felt amidst all the glory of tropic sunlight and everlasting verdure a sort of ineffable dread connected with the climate.’ Even when leaving the ‘pestilent shore’ she was ‘haunted by the shadowy presence.’ This is womanly, but a little reflection must suggest it to man.
Even half a century ago opinions differed concerning the climate of the colony. Dr. Madden could obtain only contradictory accounts. [Footnote: See _Wanderings in West Africa_, for details, vol. i. p. 275.] There is a tradition of a Chief Justice applying to the Colonial Office for information touching his pension, the clerks could not answer him, and he presently found that none of his predecessors had lived to claim it. Mr. Judge Rankin was of opinion that its ill-fame was maintained by ‘policy on the one hand and by ignorance of truth on the other.’ But Mr. Judge died a few days after. So with Dr. Macpherson, of the African Colonial Corps. It appears ill-omened to praise the place; and, after repeated visits to it, I no longer wonder that the ‘Medical Gazette’ of April 14, 1838, affirmed, ‘No statistical writer has yet tried to give the minutest fraction representing the chance of a surgeon’s return from Sierra Leone.’
On the other hand, Mrs. Falconbridge, whose husband was sent out from England on colonial business in 1791, and who wrote the first ‘lady’s book’ upon the Coast, pointed out at the beginning that sickness was due quite as much to want of care as to the climate. In 1830 Mr. John Cormack, merchant and resident since 1800, stated to a Committee of the House of Commons that out of twenty-six Europeans in his service seven had died, seven had remained in Africa, and of twelve who returned to England all save two or three were in good health. We meet with a medical opinion as early as 1836 that ‘not one-fourth of the deaths results merely from climate.’ Cases of old residents are quoted–for instance, Governor Kenneth Macaulay, a younger brother of Zachary Macaulay, who resisted it for twenty years; Mr. Reffall for fifteen years, and sundry other exceptions.
In this section of the nineteenth century it is the custom to admit that the climate is bad and dangerous; but that it has often been made the scape-goat of European recklessness and that much of the sickness and death might be avoided. The improvement is attributed to the use of quinine, unknown to the early settlers, and much is expected from sanatoria and from planting the blue gum (_Eucalyptus globulus_), which failed, owing to the carelessness and ignorance of the planters. A practical appreciation of the improvement is shown by the Star Life Assurance Society, which has reduced to five per cent. its former very heavy rates. Lastly, the bad health of foreigners is accounted for by the fact that they leave their own country for a climate to which they are not accustomed, where the social life and the habits of the people are so different from their own, and yet that they continue doing all things as in England.
But how stand the facts at the white man’s Red Grave? Mrs. Havelock and the wife of the officer commanding the garrison are the only Europeans in the colony, whereas a score of years ago I remember half a dozen. Even the warmest apologisers for the climate will not expose their wives to it, preferring to leave them at home or in Madeira. During last March there were five deaths of white men–that is, more than a third–out of a total of 163. What would the worst of English colonies say to a mortality of 350 per thousand per annum? Of course we are told that it is exceptional, and the case of the insurance societies is quoted. But they forget to tell us the reason. A mail steamer now calls at Freetown once a week, and the invalid is sent home by the first opportunity. Similarly a silly East Indian statistician proved, from the rare occurrence of fatal cases, Aden to be one of the healthiest stations under ‘the Company.’ He ignored the fact that even a scratch justified the surgeons in shipping a man off on sick leave.
I quite agree with the view of Mr. Frederick Evans: [Footnotes: _The Colonies and India_, Dec. 24, 1881.] ‘Let anyone anxious to test the nature of the climate go to Kew Gardens and sit for a week or two in one of the tropical houses there; he may be assured that he will by no means feel in robust health when he leaves.’ The simile is perfect. Europeans living in Africa like Europeans as regards clothing and diet are, I believe, quite right. We tried grass-cloth, instead of broadcloth, in Western India, when general rheumatism was the result. In the matter of meat and drink the Englishman cannot do better than adhere to his old mode of life as much as possible, with a few small modifications. Let him return to the meal-times of Queen Elizabeth’s day–
Sunrise breakfast, sun high dinner,
Sundown sup, makes a saint of a sinner–
and especially shun the 9 A.M. breakfast, which leads to a heavy tiffin at 1 P.M., the hottest and most trying section of the day. With respect to diet, if he drinks a bottle of claret in England let him reduce himself in Africa to a pint ‘cut’ with, water; if he eats a pound of meat he should be contented with eight ounces and an extra quantity of fruit and vegetables. In medicine let him halve his cathartics and double his dose of tonics.
From its topographical as well as its geographical position the climate of Freetown is oppressively hot, damp, and muggy. The annual mean is 79.5 deg. Fahr.; the usual temperature of the dwellings is from 78 deg. to 86 deg. Fahr. Its year is divided into two seasons, the Dries and the Rains. The wet season begins in May and ends with November; for the last five years the average downfall has been 155 inches, five times greater than in rainy England. These five months are times of extreme discomfort. The damp heat, despite charcoal fires in the houses and offices, mildews everything–clothes, weapons, books, man himself. It seems to exhaust all the positive electricity of the nervous system, and it makes the patient feel utterly miserable. It also fills the air with noxious vapours during the short bursts of sunshine perpendicularly rained down, and breeds a hateful brood of what the Portuguese call immundicies–a foul ‘insect-youth.’ Only the oldest residents prefer the wet to the dry months. The Rains end in the sickliest season of the year, when the sun, now getting the upper hand, sucks the miasmatic vapours from the soil and distributes them to mankind in the shape of ague and fever, dysentery, and a host of diseases. The Dries last from November to April, often beginning with tornadoes and ending with the Harmatan, smokes or scirocco. The climate is then not unlike Bombay, except that it lacks the mild East Indian attempt at a winter, and that barometric pressure hardly varies.
During my last visit to Sa Leone I secured a boat, and, accompanied by Dr. Lovegrove, of the A.S.S. _Armenian_, set out to inspect the lower bed of the Rokel and the islands which it waters. Passing along Fourah Bay, we remarked in the high background a fine brook, cold, clear, and pure, affording a delicious bath; it is almost dry in the Dries, and swells to a fiumara during the Rains. Its extent was then a diminutive rivulet tumbling some hundreds of feet down a shelving bed into Granville Bay, the break beyond Fourah. On the way we passed several Timni boats, carrying a proportionately immense amount of ‘muslin.’ Of old the lords of the land, they still come down the river with rice and cocoa-nuts from the Kwiah (Quiah) country, from Porto Loko, from Waterloo, and other places up stream. They not unfrequently console themselves for their losses by a little hard fighting; witness their defence of the Moduka stockade in 1861, when four officers and twenty-three of our men were wounded. [Footnote: _Wanderings in West Africa_, vol. i pp. 246-47.] Some of the boats are heavy row-barges with a framework of sticks for a stern-awning; an old Mandenga, with cottony beard, sits at each helm. They row _simplices munditiis_. At Sa Leone men are punished for not wearing overalls, and thus the ‘city’ becomes a rag-fair. The Timni men are dark negroids with the slightest infusion of Semitic blood; some had coated their eyebrows and part of their faces with chalk for ophthalmia. They appeared to be merry fellows enough; and they are certainly the only men in the colony who ever pretend to work. A Government official harshly says of them, ‘I would willingly ascribe to the nearest of our neighbours and their representatives in Freetown, of whom there are many, some virtues if they possessed any; but, unfortunately, taken as a people, they have been truly described by able and observant writers as dishonest and depraved.’ Mr. Secretary evidently forgets the ‘civilising’ and infectious example of Sa Leone, _versus_ the culture of El-Islam.
Arrived at Bishopscourt, we disembarked and visited the place. Here in old days ‘satisfaction’ was given and taken; and a satirical medico declared that forty years of _rencontres_ had not produced a single casualty. He was more witty than wise; I heard of one gentleman who had been ‘paraded’ and ‘winged.’ Old Granville Town, which named the bay, has completely disappeared; the ruins of the last house are gone from the broad grassy shelf upon which the first colonists built their homes.
From Granville Bay the traveller may return by the ‘Kissy Road.’ Once it was the pet promenade, the Corso, the show-walk of Freetown; now it has become a Tottenham Court Road, to which Water, Oxford, and Westmoreland Streets are preferred. The vegetation becomes splendid, running up to the feet of the hills, which swell suddenly from the shelf-plain. The approach to Sa Leone is heralded by a row of shops even smaller and meaner than those near the market-place. There are whole streets of these rabbit-hutches, whose contents ‘mammy,’ when day is done, carries home in a ‘bly’-basket upon her head, possibly leaving ‘titty’ to mount guard upon the remnant. The stock in trade may represent a capital of 4_l_., and the profits 1_s_. a day. Yet ‘daddy’ styles himself merchant, gets credit, and spends his evenings conversing and smoking cigars–as a gentleman should–with his commercial friends.
Passing the easternmost end of the peninsula, and sailing along the Bullom (‘lowland’) shores, we verified Dr. Blyden’s assertion that this ‘home of fevers’ shows no outward and visible sign of exceeding unhealthiness. The soil is sandy, the bush is comparatively thin, and the tall trees give it the aspect of a high and dry land. We then turned north-east and skirted Tasso Island, a strip of river-holm girt with a wall of mangroves. It had an old English fort, founded in 1695; the factors traded with the Pulo (Fulah) country for slaves, ivory, and gold. It was abandoned after being taken by Van Ruyter, when he restored to the Dutch West Indian Company the conquests of Commodore Holmes. The rich soil in 1800 supported a fine cotton plantation, and here Mr. Heddle kept a ‘factory.’ The villagers turned out to gaze, not habited like the Wolofs of Albreda, but clad in shady hats and seedy pantaloons.
After clearing Tasso we advanced merrily, and at the end of two hours’ and a half actual sailing and pulling we landed upon Bance, which some call Bence’s Island. A ruined jetty with two rusty guns, buried like posts, projected from the sand-strip; and a battery, where nine cannon still linger, defended the approach. There is a similar beach to the north-east, with admirable bathing in the tepid, brackish waves and a fine view of the long leonine Sierra. The outlying rocks, capped with guano, look like moored boats and awnings. The sea-breeze was delicious; the lapping, dazzling stream made sweet music, and the huge cotton-trees with laminar buttresses gave most grateful shade.
The island resembles Gambian James multiplied by four or five. Behind the battery are the ruins of a huge building, like the palaces of old Goa, vast rooms, magazines, barracoons, underground vaults, and all manner of contrivances for the good comfort and entertainment of the slaver and the slave. A fine promenade of laterite, which everywhere about Sa Leone builds the best of roads, and a strip of jungle rich in the _Guilandina Bonduc_, whose medicinal properties are well known to the people, leads to the long-deserted graveyard. We pass an old well with water thirty-five feet deep, and enter the _enceinte_, that contains four tombs; the marble tablets, which would soon disappear in India for the benefit of curry-stuffs, here remain intact. One long home was tenanted by ‘Thomas Knight, Esquire, born in the county of Surrey, who acted eighteen years as agent for the proprietors of this island, and who died on August 27 of 1785,’ beloved, of course, by everybody. Second came the ‘honourable sea-Captain Hiort, born in 1746, married in 1771 to the virtuous lady Catherine Schive, and died in 1783, leaving two good-natured daughters, which his soul is in the hands of God.’ The third was Mr. John Tittle, who departed life in 1776; and the last was Captain Josiah Dory, a ‘man of upright character,’ who migrated to the many in 1765.
Barbot (ii. 1) describes Bance’s Island as defended by a small fort on a steep rock of difficult access, ascended only by a sort of stairs cut in the stone, and acting as the store-house of the Royal African Company. The low walls of lime and ashlar had a round ‘flanker’ with five guns, a curtain with embrasures for four large cannon, and a platform just before it for six guns, all well mounted. The only good buildings were the slave-booths. Winterbottom, who places it over eighteen miles above St. George’s Bay (_Baie de France_) and north of Tasso Island, thus describes Bance: ‘This is a small barren island considerably elevated, with a dry, gravelly soil; but being placed as it were in the midst of an archipelago of low marshy islands, the breeze, from whatever quarter it blows, is impregnated with moisture and marsh effluvia, which render it sickly. The air also is very much heated, and the thermometer generally stands 4 deg. or 5 deg. higher on this island than it does at Freetown.’
We regained the steamer shortly after dark, delighted with our picnic and resolved always to take the same advantage of all halts. In those days the interior was most interesting. The rivers Scarcies, Nunez, and Ponga were unknown; the equestrian Susu tribe had never been visited; and, the Timbo country, the great centre whence arise the Niger, the Rokel, and the Senegal, awaited exploration.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.