It
Is Difficult, Unless You Have Haunted These Seas, To Realise The
Interest We Take Down There In Currents; Particularly When You Are
Navigating Small Sailing Boats, A Pursuit I Indulge In Necessarily
From My Fishing Practices.
Their effect on the climate too is very
marked.
If we could only arrange for some terrific affair to take
place in the bed of the Atlantic, that would send that precious
Guinea current to the place it evidently comes from, and get the
cool Equatorial alongside the mainland shore, West Africa would be
quite another place.
Fernando Po is the most important island as regards size on the West
African coast, and at the same time one of the most beautiful in the
world. It is a great volcanic mass with many craters, and
culminates in the magnificent cone, Clarence Peak, called by the
Spaniards, Pico de Santa Isabel, by the natives of the island O
Wassa. Seen from the sea or from the continent it looks like an
immense single mountain that has floated out to sea. It is visible
during clear weather (and particularly sharply visible in the
strange clearness you get after a tornado) from a hundred miles to
seawards, and anything more perfect than Fernando Po when you sight
it, as you occasionally do from far-away Bonny Bar, in the sunset,
floating like a fairy island made of gold or of amethyst, I cannot
conceive. It is almost equally lovely at close quarters, namely
from the mainland at Victoria, nineteen miles distant. Its moods of
beauty are infinite; for the most part gentle and gorgeous, but I
have seen it silhouetted hard against tornado-clouds, and grandly
grim from the upper regions of its great brother Mungo. And as for
Fernando Po in full moonlight - well there! you had better go and see
it yourself.
The whole island is, or rather I should say was, heavily forested
almost to its peak, with a grand and varied type of forest, very
rich in oil palms and tree-ferns, and having an undergrowth
containing an immense variety and quantity of ferns and mosses.
Sugar-cane also grows wild here, an uncommon thing in West Africa.
The last botanical collection of any importance made from these
forests was that of Herr Mann, and its examination showed that
Abyssinian genera and species predominated, and that many species
similar to those found in the mountains of Mauritius, the Isle de
Bourbon, and Madagascar, were present. The number of European
plants (forty-three genera, twenty-seven species) is strikingly
large, most of the British forms being represented chiefly at the
higher elevations. What was more striking was that it showed that
South African forms were extremely rare, and not one of the
characteristic types of St. Helena occurred.
Cocoa, coffee, and cinchona, alas! flourish in Fernando Po, as the
coffee suffers but little from the disease that harasses it on the
mainland at Victoria, and this is the cause of the great destruction
of the forest that is at present taking place. San Thome, a few
years ago, was discovered by its surprised neighbours to be amassing
great wealth by growing coffee, and so Fernando Po and Principe
immediately started to amass great wealth too, and are now hard at
work with gangs of miscellaneous natives got from all parts of the
Coast save the Kru. For to the Kruboy, "Panier," as he calls
"Spaniard," is a name of horror worse even than Portugee, although
he holds "God made white man and God made black man, but dem debil
make Portugee," and he also remembers an unfortunate affair that
occurred some years ago now, in connection with coffee-growing.
A number of Krumen engaged themselves for a two years' term of
labour on the Island of San Thome, and when they arrived there, were
set to work on coffee plantations by the Portuguese. Now
agricultural work is "woman's palaver," but nevertheless the Krumen
made shift to get through with it, vowing the while no doubt, as
they hopefully notched away the moons on their tally-sticks, that
they would never let the girls at home know that they had been
hoeing. But when their moons were all complete, instead of being
sent home with their pay to "We country," they were put off from
time to time; and month after month went by and they were still on
San Thome, and still hoeing. At last the home-sick men, in despair
of ever getting free, started off secretly in ones and twos to try
and get to "We country" across hundreds of miles of the storm-
haunted Atlantic in small canoes, and with next to no provisions.
The result was a tragedy, but it might easily have been worse; for a
few, a very few, were picked up alive by English vessels and taken
back to their beloved "We country" to tell the tale. But many a
canoe was found with a dead Kruboy or so in it; and many a one
which, floating bottom upwards, graphically spoke of madness caused
by hunger, thirst, and despair having driven its occupants overboard
to the sharks.
My Portuguese friends assure me that there was never thought of
permanently detaining the boys, and that they were only just keeping
them until other labourers arrived to take their place on the
plantations. I quite believe them, for I have seen too much of the
Portuguese in Africa to believe that they would, in a wholesale way,
be cruel to natives. But I am not in the least surprised that the
poor Krumen took the Portuguese logo and amanha for Eternity itself,
for I have frequently done so.
The greatest length of the island lies N.E. and S.W., and amounts to
thirty-three miles; the mean breadth is seventeen miles. The port,
Clarence Cove, now called Santa Isabel by the Spaniards - who have
been giving Spanish names to all the English-named places without
any one taking much notice of them - is a very remarkable place, and
except perhaps Gaboon the finest harbour on the West Coast.
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