The Only Break In Them - One Can Hardly Call It A
Relief To The Scenery - Are The Gaunt Black Ribs
Of the old hulks,
once used as trading stations, which lie exposed at low water near
the shore, protruding like
The skeletons of great unclean beasts who
have died because Bonny water was too strong even for them.
Raised on piles from the mud shore you will see the white-painted
factories and their great store-houses for oil; each factory likely
enough with its flag at half-mast, which does not enliven the
scenery either, for you know it is because somebody is "dead again."
Throughout and over all is the torrential downpour of the wet-season
rain, coming down night and day with its dull roar. I have known it
rain six mortal weeks in Bonny River, just for all the world as if
it were done by machinery, and the interval that came then was only
a few wet days, where-after it settled itself down to work again in
the good West Coast waterspout pour for more weeks.
While your eyes are drinking in the characteristics of Bonny scenery
you notice a peculiar smell - an intensification of that smell you
noticed when nearing Bonny, in the evening, out at sea. That's the
breath of the malarial mud, laden with fever, and the chances are
you will be down to-morrow. If it is near evening time now, you can
watch it becoming incarnate, creeping and crawling and gliding out
from the side creeks and between the mangrove-roots, laying itself
upon the river, stretching and rolling in a kind of grim play, and
finally crawling up the side of the ship to come on board and leave
its cloak of moisture that grows green mildew in a few hours over
all. Noise you will not be much troubled with: there is only that
rain, a sound I have known make men who are sick with fever well-
nigh mad, and now and again the depressing cry of the curlews which
abound here. This combination is such that after six or eight hours
of it you will be thankful to hear your shipmates start to work the
winch. I take it you are hard up when you relish a winch. And you
will say - let your previous experience of the world be what it may -
Good Heavens, what a place!
Five times have I been now in Bonny River and I like it. You always
do get to like it if you live long enough to allow the strange
fascination of the place to get a hold on you; but when I first
entered it, on a ship commanded by Captain Murray in '93, in the wet
season, i.e. in August, in spite of the confidence I had by this
time acquired in his skill and knowledge of the West Coast, a sense
of horror seized on me as I gazed upon the scene, and I said to the
old Coaster who then had charge of my education, "Good Heavens! what
an awful accident. We've gone and picked up the Styx." He was
evidently hurt and said, "Bonny was a nice place when you got used
to it," and went on to discourse on the last epidemic here, when
nine men out of the resident eleven died in about ten days from
yellow fever. Next to the scenery of "a River," commend me for
cheerfulness to the local conversation of its mangrove-swamp region;
and every truly important West African river has its mangrove-swamp
belt, which extends inland as far as the tide waters make it
brackish, and which has a depth and extent from the banks depending
on the configuration of the country. Above this belt comes
uniformly a region of high forest, having towards the river frontage
clay cliffs, sometimes high, as in the case of the Old Calabar at
Adiabo, more frequently dwarf cliffs, as in the Forcados up at
Warree, and in the Ogowe, - for a long stretch through Kama country.
After the clay cliffs region you come to a region of rapids, caused
by the river cutting its way through a mountain range; such ranges
are the Pallaballa, causing the Livingstone rapids of the Congo; the
Sierra del Cristal, those of the Ogowe, and many lesser rivers; the
Rumby and Omon ranges, those of the Old Calabar and Cross Rivers.
Naturally in different parts these separate regions vary in size.
The mangrove-swamp may be only a fringe at the mouth of the river,
or it may cover hundreds of square miles. The clay cliffs may
extend for only a mile or so along the bank, or they may, as on the
Ogowe, extend for 130. And so it is also with the rapids: in some
rivers, for instance the Cameroons, there are only a few miles of
them, in others there are many miles; in the Ogowe there are as many
as 500; and these rapids may be close to the river mouth, as in most
of the Gold Coast rivers, save the Ancobra and the Volta; or they
may be far in the interior, as in the Cross River, where they
commence at about 200 miles; and on the Ogowe, where they commence
at about 208 miles from the sea coast; this depends on the nearness
or remoteness from the coast line of the mountain ranges which run
down the west side of the continent; ranges (apparently of very
different geological formations), which have no end of different
names, but about which little is known in detail. {80}
And now we will leave generalisations on West African rivers and go
into particulars regarding one little known in England, and called
by its owners, the French, the greatest strictly equatorial river in
the world - the Ogowe.
CHAPTER IV. THE OGOWE.
Wherein the voyager gives extracts from the Log of the Move and of
the Eclaireur, and an account of the voyager's first meeting with
"those fearful Fans," also an awful warning to all young persons who
neglect the study of the French language.
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