In 1858 The Spanish Government Thinking, Presumably, That The Slave
Trade Was Suppressed Enough, Or At Any Rate To A
Sufficiently
inconvenient extent, re-claimed Fernando Po, to the horror of the
Baptist missionaries who had settled in Clarence apparently
Under
the erroneous idea that the island had been definitely taken over by
the English. This mission had received from the West African
Company a large grant of land, and had collected round it a
gathering of Sierra Leonians and other artisan and trading Africans
who were attracted to Clarence by the work made by the naval
station; and these people, with the English traders who also settled
here for a like reason, were the founders of Clarence Town. The
declaration of the Spanish Government stating that only Roman
Catholic missions would be countenanced caused the Baptists to
abandon their possessions and withdraw to the mainland in Ambas Bay,
where they have since remained, and nowadays Protestantism is
represented by a Methodist Mission which has a sub-branch on the
mainland on the Akwayafe River and one on the Qua Ibo.
The Spaniards, on resuming possession of the island, had one of
their attacks of activity regarding it, and sent out with Don Carlos
Chacon, who was to take over the command, four Jesuit priests, a
secretary, a commissariat officer, a custom-house clerk, and a
transport, the Santa Maria, with a number of emigrant families.
This attempt to colonise Fernando Po should have at least done the
good of preventing such experiments ever being tried again with
women and children, for of these unfortunate creatures - for whom, in
spite of its being the wet season, no houses had been provided - more
than 20 per cent. died in the space of five months. Mr. Hutchinson,
who was English Consul at the time, tells us that "In a very short
time gaunt figures of men, women, and children might be seen
crawling through the streets, with scarcely an evidence of life in
their faces, save the expression of a sort of torpid carelessness as
to how soon it might be their turn to drop off and die. The
Portino, a steamer, carried back fifty of them to Cadiz, who looked
when they embarked more like living skeletons of skin and bone than
animated human beings." {47} I quote this not to cast reproach on
the Spanish Government, but merely to give a fact, a case in point,
of the deadly failure of endeavours to colonise on the West Coast, a
thing which is even now occasionally attempted, always with the same
sad results, though in most cases these attempts are now made by
religious but misinformed people under Bishop Taylor's mission.
The Spaniards did not entirely confine their attention to planting
colonists in a ready-made state on the island. As soon as they had
settled themselves and built their barracks and Government House,
they set to work and cleared away the bush for an area of from four
to six miles round the town. The ground soon became overgrown
again, but this clearing is still perceptible in the different type
of forest on it, and has enabled the gardens and little plantations
round Clarence to be made more easily. My Spanish friends assure me
that the Portuguese, who discovered the island in 1471, {48a} and
who exchanged it and Anno Bom in 1778 to the Spaniards for the
little island of Catalina and the colony of Sacramento in South
America, did not do anything to develop it. When they, the
Spaniards, first entered into possession they at once set to work to
colonise and clear. Then the colonisation scheme went to the bad,
the natives poisoned the wells, it is said, and the attention of the
Spaniards was in those days turned, for some inscrutable reason, to
the eastern shores of the island - a district now quite abandoned by
whites, on account of its unhealthiness - and they lost in addition
to the colonists a terrible quantity of their sailors, in Concepcion
Bay. {48b} A lull then followed, and the Spaniards willingly lent
the place to the English as aforesaid. They say we did nothing
except establish Clarence as a headquarters, which they consider to
have been a most excellent enterprise, and import the Baptist
Mission, which they hold as a less estimable undertaking; but there!
that's nothing to what the Baptist Mission hold regarding the
Spaniards. For my own part, I wish the Spaniards better luck this
time in their activity, for in directing it to plantations they are
on a truer and safer road to wealth than they have been with their
previous importations of Cuban political prisoners and ready-made
families of colonists, and I hope they will send home those
unfortunate wretches they have there now, and commence, in their
expected two years, to reap the profits of the coffee and cocoa.
Certainly the chances are that they may, for the soil of Fernando Po
is of exceeding fertility; Mr. Hutchinson says he has known Indian
corn planted here on a Monday evening make its appearance four
inches above ground on the following Wednesday morning, within a
period, he carefully says, of thirty-six hours. I have seen this
sort of thing over in Victoria, but I like to get a grown, strong
man, and a Consul of Her Britannic Majesty, to say it for me.
Having discoursed at large on the various incomers to Fernando Po we
may next turn to the natives, properly so-called, the Bubis. These
people, although presenting a series of interesting problems to the
ethnologist, both from their insular position, and their
differentiation from any of the mainland peoples, are still but
little known. To a great extent this has arisen from their
exclusiveness, and their total lack of enthusiasm in trade matters,
a thing that differentiates them more than any other characteristic
from the mainlanders, who, young and old, men and women, regard
trade as the great affair of life, take to it as soon as they can
toddle, and don't even leave it off at death, according to their own
accounts of the way the spirits of distinguished traders still
dabble and interfere in market matters.
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