But The Mangrove-Swamp Follows The General Rule For West Africa, And
Night In It Is Noisier Than The Day.
After dark it is full of
noises; grunts from I know not what, splashes from jumping fish, the
peculiar whirr of rushing crabs, and quaint creaking and groaning
sounds from the trees; and - above all in eeriness - the strange whine
and sighing cough of crocodiles.
Great regions of mangrove-swamps are a characteristic feature of the
West African Coast. The first of these lies north of Sierra Leone;
then they occur, but of smaller dimensions - just fringes of river-
outfalls - until you get to Lagos, when you strike the greatest of
them all: - the swamps of the Niger outfalls (about twenty-three
rivers in all) and of the Sombreiro, New Calabar, Bonny, San
Antonio, Opobo (false and true), Kwoibo, Old Calabar (with the Cross
Akwayafe Qwa Rivers) and Rio del Rey Rivers. The whole of this
great stretch of coast is a mangrove-swamp, each river silently
rolling down its great mass of mud-laden waters and constituting
each in itself a very pretty problem to the navigator by its network
of intercommunicating creeks, and the sand and mud bar which it
forms off its entrance by dropping its heaviest mud; its lighter mud
is carried out beyond its bar and makes the nasty-smelling brown
soup of the South Atlantic Ocean, with froth floating in lines and
patches on it, for miles to seaward.
In this great region of swamps every mile appears like every other
mile until you get well used to it, and are able to distinguish the
little local peculiarities at the entrance of the rivers and in the
winding of the creeks, a thing difficult even for the most
experienced navigator to do during those thick wool-like mists
called smokes, which hang about the whole Bight from November till
May (the dry season), sometimes lasting all day, sometimes clearing
off three hours after sunrise.
The upper or north-westerly part of the swamp is round the mouths of
the Niger, and it successfully concealed this fact from geographers
down to 1830, when the series of heroic journeys made by Mungo Park,
Clapperton, and the two Landers finally solved the problem - a
problem that was as great and which cost more men's lives than even
the discovery of the sources of the Nile.
That this should have been so may seem very strange to us who now
have been told the answer to the riddle; for the upper waters of
this great river were known of before Christ and spoken of by
Herodotus, Pliny and Ptolemy, and its mouths navigated continuously
along by the seaboard by trading vessels since the fifteenth
century, but they were not recognised as belonging to the Niger.
Some geographers held that the Senegal or the Gambia was its
outfall; others that it was the Zaire (Congo); others that it did
not come out on the West Coast at all, but got mixed up with the
Nile in the middle of the continent, and so on. Yet when you come
to know the swamps this is not so strange. You find on going up
what looks like a big river - say Forcados, two and a half miles wide
at the entrance and a real bit of the Niger. Before you are up it
far great, broad, business-like-looking river entrances open on
either side, showing wide rivers mangrove-walled, but two-thirds of
them are utter frauds which will ground you within half an hour of
your entering them. Some few of them do communicate with other main
channels to the great upper river, and others are main channels
themselves; but most of them intercommunicate with each other and
lead nowhere in particular, and you can't even get there because of
their shallowness. It is small wonder that the earlier navigators
did not get far up them in sailing ships, and that the problem had
to be solved by men descending the main stream of the Niger before
it commences to what we in Devonshire should call "squander itself
about" in all these channels. And in addition it must be remembered
that the natives with whom these trading vessels dealt, first for
slaves, afterwards for palm-oil, were not, and are not now, members
of the Lo family of savages. Far from it: they do not go in for
"gentle smiles," but for murdering any unprotected boat's crew they
happen to come across, not only for a love of sport but to keep
white traders from penetrating to the trade-producing interior, and
spoiling prices. And the region is practically foodless.
The rivers of the great mangrove-swamp from the Sombreiro to the Rio
del Rey are now known pretty surely not to be branches of the Niger,
but the upper regions of this part of the Bight are much neglected
by English explorers. I believe the great swamp region of the Bight
of Biafra is the greatest in the world, and that in its immensity
and gloom it has a grandeur equal to that of the Himalayas.
Take any man, educated or not, and place him on Bonny or Forcados
River in the wet season on a Sunday - Bonny for choice. Forcados is
good. You'll keep Forcados scenery "indelibly limned on the tablets
of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page," after you
have spent even a week waiting for the Lagos branch-boat on its inky
waters. But Bonny! Well, come inside the bar and anchor off the
factories: seaward there is the foam of the bar gleaming and wicked
white against a leaden sky and what there is left of Breaker Island.
In every other direction you will see the apparently endless walls
of mangrove, unvarying in colour, unvarying in form, unvarying in
height, save from perspective. Beneath and between you and them lie
the rotting mud waters of Bonny River, and away up and down river,
miles of rotting mud waters fringed with walls of rotting mud
mangrove-swamp.
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