My own conversation may be smiled at now for
the same cause. Many of my friends mentioned even in this very
recent account of the Coast "are dead now." Most of those I learnt
to know in 1893; chief among these is my old friend Captain Boler,
of Bonny, from whom I first learnt a certain power of comprehending
the African and his form of thought.
I have great reason to be grateful to the Africans themselves - to
cultured men and women among them like Charles Owoo, Mbo, Sanga
Glass, Jane Harrington and her sister at Gaboon, and to the bush
natives; but of my experience with them I give further details, so I
need not dwell on them here.
I apologise to the general reader for giving so much detail on
matters that really only affect myself, and I know that the
indebtedness which all African travellers have to the white
residents in Africa is a matter usually very lightly touched on. No
doubt my voyage would seem a grander thing if I omitted mention of
the help I received, but - well, there was a German gentleman once
who evolved a camel out of his inner consciousness. It was a
wonderful thing; still, you know, it was not a good camel, only a
thing which people personally unacquainted with camels could believe
in. Now I am ambitious to make a picture, if I make one at all,
that people who do know the original can believe in - even if they
criticise its points - and so I give you details a more showy artist
would omit.
CHAPTER I. LIVERPOOL TO SIERRA LEONE AND THE GOLD COAST.
Setting forth how the voyager departs from England in a stout vessel
and in good company, and reaches in due course the Island of the
Grand Canary, and then the Port of Sierra Leone: to which is added
some account of this latter place and the comeliness of its women.
Wherein also some description of Cape Coast and Accra is given, to
which are added divers observations on supplies to be obtained
there.
The West Coast of Africa is like the Arctic regions in one
particular, and that is that when you have once visited it you want
to go back there again; and, now I come to think of it, there is
another particular in which it is like them, and that is that the
chances you have of returning from it at all are small, for it is a
Belle Dame sans merci.
I succumbed to the charm of the Coast as soon as I left Sierra Leone
on my first voyage out, and I saw more than enough during that
voyage to make me recognise that there was any amount of work for me
worth doing down there.
