This Causes A Good Deal Of Unpleasantness, And The
Trader's Nights Are Now Cheered By Lively War-Dances Outside His
Stockade; the accompanying songs advertising that the customers are
coming over the stockade to raid the store, and cut up
The trader
"into bits like a fish." Sometimes they do come - and then - finish;
but usually they don't; and gradually settle down, and respect the
trader greatly as "a Devil man"; and do business on sound lines
during the day. Over the stockade at night, by ones and twos,
stealing, they will come to the end of the chapter.
Moonlight nights are fairly restful for the bush trader, but when it
is inky black, or pouring with rain, he has got to be very much out
and about, and particularly vigilant has he got to be on tornado
nights - a most uncomfortable sort of weather to attend to business
in, I assure you.
The factory at Agonjo was typical; the house is a fine specimen of
the Igalwa style of architecture; mounted on poles above the ground;
the space under the house being used as a store for rubber in
barrels, and ebony in billets; thereby enabling the trader to hover
over these precious possessions, sleeping and waking, like a sitting
hen over her eggs. Near to the house are the sleeping places for
the beach hands, and the cook-house. In front, in a position
commanded by the eye from the verandah, and well withdrawn from the
stockade, are great piles of billets of red bar wood. The whole of
the clean, sandy yard containing these things, and divers others, is
surrounded by a stout stockade, its main face to the river frontage,
the water at high tide lapping its base, and at low tide exposing in
front of it a shore of black slime. Although I cite this factory as
a typical factory of a black trader, it is a specimen of the highest
class, for, being in connection with Messrs. Hatton and Cookson it
is well kept up and stocked. Firms differ much in this particular.
Messrs. Hatton and Cookson, like Messrs. Miller Brothers in the
Bights, take every care that lies in their power of the people who
serve them, down to the Kruboys working on their beaches, giving
ample and good rations and providing good houses. But this is not
so with all firms on the Coast. I have seen factories belonging to
the Swedish houses beside which this factory at Agonjo is a palace
although those factories are white man factories, and the
unfortunate white men in them are expected by these firms to live on
native chop - an expectation the Agents by no means realise, for they
usually die. Black hands, however, do not suffer much at the hands
of such firms, for the Swedish Agents are a quiet, gentlemanly set
of men, in the best sense of that much misused term, and they do not
employ on their beaches such a staff of black helpers as the English
houses, so the two or three Kruboys on a starvation beach can fairly
well fend for themselves, for there is always an adjacent village,
and in that village there are always chickens, and on the shore
crabs, and in the river fish, and for the rest of his diet the
Kruboy flirts with the local ladies.
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