I
Had Hoped This River Would Have Been The Niger, For Sir George
Goldie Had Placed At My Disposal Great
Facilities for carrying on
work there in comfort; but for certain private reasons I was
disinclined to go from the
Royal Niger Protectorate into the Royal
Niger Company's territory; and the Calabar, where Sir Claude
MacDonald did everything he possibly could to assist me, I did not
find a good river for me to collect fishes in. These two rivers
failing me, from no fault of either of their own presiding genii, my
only hope of doing anything now lay on the South West Coast river,
the Ogowe, and everything there depended on Mr. Hudson's attitude
towards scientific research in the domain of ichthyology.
Fortunately for me that gentleman elected to take a favourable view
of this affair, and in every way in his power assisted me during my
entire stay in Congo Francais. But before I enter into a detailed
description of this wonderful bit of West Africa, I must give you a
brief notice of the manners, habits and customs of West Coast rivers
in general, to make the thing more intelligible.
There is an uniformity in the habits of West Coast rivers, from the
Volta to the Coanza, which is, when you get used to it, very taking.
Excepting the Congo, the really great river comes out to sea with as
much mystery as possible; lounging lazily along among its mangrove
swamps in a what's-it-matter-when-one-comes-out and where's-the-
hurry style, through quantities of channels inter-communicating with
each other. Each channel, at first sight as like the other as peas
in a pod, is bordered on either side by green-black walls of
mangroves, which Captain Lugard graphically described as seeming "as
if they had lost all count of the vegetable proprieties, and were
standing on stilts with their branches tucked up out of the wet,
leaving their gaunt roots exposed in midair." High-tide or low-
tide, there is little difference in the water; the river, be it
broad or narrow, deep or shallow, looks like a pathway of polished
metal; for it is as heavy weighted with stinking mud as water e'er
can be, ebb or flow, year out and year in. But the difference in
the banks, though an unending alternation between two appearances,
is weird.
At high-water you do not see the mangroves displaying their ankles
in the way that shocked Captain Lugard. They look most respectable,
their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and
there by the white line of an aerial root, coming straight down into
the water from some upper branch as straight as a plummet, in the
strange, knowing way an aerial root of a mangrove does, keeping the
hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level,
and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the
water and grasp the mud. Banks indeed at high water can hardly be
said to exist, the water stretching away into the mangrove swamps
for miles and miles, and you can then go, in a suitable small canoe,
away among these swamps as far as you please.
This is a fascinating pursuit. But it is a pleasure to be indulged
in with caution; for one thing, you are certain to come across
crocodiles. Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying
asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a
picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a
steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations
on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small
dug-out canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake - a
thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming
along - and when he has got his foot upon his native heath - that is
to say, his tail within holding reach of his native mud - he is
highly interesting, and you may not be able to write home about him-
-and you get frightened on your own behalf; for crocodiles can, and
often do, in such places, grab at people in small canoes. I have
known of several natives losing their lives in this way; some native
villages are approachable from the main river by a short cut, as it
were, through the mangrove swamps, and the inhabitants of such
villages will now and then go across this way with small canoes
instead of by the constant channel to the village, which is almost
always winding. In addition to this unpleasantness you are liable -
until you realise the danger from experience, or have native advice
on the point - to get tide-trapped away in the swamps, the water
falling round you when you are away in some deep pool or lagoon, and
you find you cannot get back to the main river. Of course if you
really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about
Posterity, and Posterity's Science, you will jump over into the
black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the
terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care
you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum.
But if you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me,
you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again; most of your
attention is directed to dealing with an "at home" to crocodiles and
mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime round you.
What little time you have over you will employ in wondering why you
came to West Africa, and why, after having reached this point of
folly, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose,
by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove
swamps.
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