Giving some account of the occupation of this island by the whites
and the manners and customs of the blacks peculiar to it.
Our outward voyage really terminated at Calabar, and it terminated
gorgeously in fireworks and what not, in honour of the coming of
Lady MacDonald, the whole settlement, white and black, turning out
to do her honour to the best of its ability; and its ability in this
direction was far greater than, from my previous knowledge of Coast
conditions, I could have imagined possible. Before Sir Claude
MacDonald settled down again to local work, he and Lady MacDonald
crossed to Fernando Po, still in the Batanga, and I accompanied
them, thus getting an opportunity of seeing something of Spanish
official circles.
I had heard sundry noble legends of Fernando Po, and seen the coast
and a good deal of the island before, but although I had heard much
of the Governor, I had never met him until I went up to his
residence with Lady MacDonald and the Consul-General. He was a
delightful person, who, as a Spanish naval officer, some time
resident in Cuba, had picked up a lot of English, with a strong
American accent clinging to it. He gave a most moving account of
how, as soon as his appointment as Governor was announced, all his
friends and acquaintances carefully explained to him that this
appointment was equivalent to execution, only more uncomfortable in
the way it worked out. During the outward voyage this was daily
confirmed by the stories told by the sailors and merchants
personally acquainted with the place, who were able to support their
information with dates and details of the decease of the victims to
the climate.
Still he kept up a good heart, but when he arrived at the island he
found his predecessor had died of fever; and he himself, the day
after landing, went down with a bad attack and he was placed in a
bed - the same bed, he was mournfully informed, in which the last
Governor had expired. Then he did believe, all in one awful lump,
all the stories he had been told, and added to their horrors a few
original conceptions of death and purgatory, and a lot of
transparent semi-formed images of his own delirium. Fortunately
both prophecy and personal conviction alike miscarried, and the
Governor returned from the jaws of death. But without a moment's
delay he withdrew from the Port of Clarence and went up the mountain
to Basile, which is in the neighbourhood of the highest native
village, where he built himself a house, and around it a little
village of homes for the most unfortunate set of human beings I have
ever laid eye on. They are the remnant of a set of Spanish
colonists, who had been located at some spot in the Spanish
possessions in Morocco, and finding that place unfit to support
human life, petitioned the Government to remove them and let them
try colonising elsewhere.
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