When You Have Got Very Chilled Or Over-Tired,
Take An Extra Five Grains With A Little Wine Or Spirit
At any time,
and when you know, by reason of aching head and limbs and a
sensation of a stream
Of cold water down your back and an awful
temper, that you are in for a fever, send for a doctor if you can.
If, as generally happens, there is no doctor near to send for, take
a compound calomel and colocynth pill, fifteen grains of quinine and
a grain of opium, and go to bed wrapped up in the best blanket
available. When safely there take lashings of hot tea or, what is
better, a hot drink made from fresh lime-juice, strong and without
sugar - fresh limes are almost always to be had - if not, bottled
lime-juice does well. Then, in the hot stage, don't go fanning
about, nor in the perspiring stage, for if you get a chill then you
may turn a mild dose of fever into a fatal one. If, however, you
keep conscientiously rolled in your blanket until the perspiring
stage is well over, and stay in bed till the next morning, the
chances are you will be all right, though a little shaky about the
legs. You should continue the quinine, taking it in five-grain
doses, up to fifteen to twenty grains a day for a week after any
attack of fever, but you must omit the opium pill. The great thing
in West Africa is to keep up your health to a good level, that will
enable you to resist fever, and it is exceedingly difficult for most
people to do this, because of the difficulty of getting exercise and
good food. But do what you may it is almost certain you will get
fever during a residence of more than six months on the Coast, and
the chances are two to one on the Gold Coast that you will die of
it. But, without precautions, you will probably have it within a
fortnight of first landing, and your chances of surviving are almost
nil. With precautions, in the Rivers and on the S.W. Coast your
touch of fever may be a thing inferior in danger and discomfort to a
bad cold in England.
Yet remember, before you elect to cast your lot in with the West
Coasters, that 85 per cent. of them die of fever or return home with
their health permanently wrecked. Also remember that there is no
getting acclimatised to the Coast. There are, it is true, a few men
out there who, although they have been resident in West Africa for
years, have never had fever, but you can count them up on the
fingers of one hand. There is another class who have been out for
twelve months at a time, and have not had a touch of fever; these
you want the fingers of your two hands to count, but no more. By
far the largest class is the third, which is made up of those who
have a slight dose of fever once a fortnight, and some day,
apparently for no extra reason, get a heavy dose and die of it. A
very considerable class is the fourth - those who die within a
fortnight to a month of going ashore.
The fate of a man depends solely on his power of resisting the so-
called malaria, not in his system becoming inured to it. The first
class of men that I have cited have some unknown element in their
constitutions that renders them immune. With the second class the
power of resistance is great, and can be renewed from time to time
by a spell home in a European climate. In the third class the state
is that of cumulative poisoning; in the fourth of acute poisoning.
Let the new-comer who goes to the Coast take the most cheerful view
of these statements and let him regard himself as preordained to be
one of the two most favoured classes. Let him take every care short
of getting frightened, which is as deadly as taking no care at all,
and he may - I sincerely hope he will - survive; for a man who has got
the grit in him to go and fight in West Africa for those things
worth fighting for - duty, honour and gold - is a man whose death is a
dead loss to his country.
The cargoes from West Africa truly may "wives and mithers maist
despairing ca' them lives o' men." Yet grievous as is the price
England pays for her West African possessions, to us who know the
men who risk their lives and die for them, England gets a good
equivalent value for it; for she is the greatest manufacturing
country in the world, and as such requires markets. Nowadays she
requires them more than new colonies. A colony drains annually
thousands of the most enterprising and energetic of her children
from her, leaving behind them their aged and incapable relations.
Moreover, a colony gradually becomes a rival manufacturing centre to
the mother country, whereas West Africa will remain for hundreds of
years a region that will supply the manufacturer with his raw
material, and take in exchange for it his manufactured articles,
giving him a good margin of profit. And the holding of our West
African markets drains annually a few score of men only - only too
often for ever - but the trade they carry on and develop there - a
trade, according to Sir George Baden-Powell, of the annual value of
nine millions sterling - enables thousands of men, women and children
to remain safely in England, in comfort and pleasure, owing to the
wages and profits arising from the manufacture and export of the
articles used in that trade.
So I trust that those at home in England will give all honour to the
men still working in West Africa, or rotting in the weed-grown,
snake-infested cemeteries and the forest swamps - men whose battles
have been fought out on lonely beaches far away from home and
friends and often from another white man's help, sometimes with
savages, but more often with a more deadly foe, with none of the
anodyne to death and danger given by the companionship of hundreds
of fellow soldiers in a fight with a foe you can see, but with a foe
you can see only incarnate in the dreams of your delirium, which
runs as a poison in burning veins and aching brain - the dread West
Coast fever.
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Words from 190785 to 191885
of 194943
