In Victoria a
grove of gigantic cacao trees is heavily overgrown with this lovely
orchid in a most perfect way.
It does not seem to injure the cacaos
in the least, and there are other kinds of trees it will take
equally well to. I saw it growing happily and luxuriantly under the
direction of the Roman Catholic Mission at Landana; but it requires
a continuously damp climate. Vanilla when once started gives little
or no trouble, and its pods do not require any very careful
manipulation before sending to Europe, and this is a very important
point, for a great hindrance - THE great hindrance to plantation
enterprise on the Coast - is the difficulty of getting neat-handed
labourers. I had once the pleasure of meeting a Dutch gentleman - a
plantation expert, who had been sent down the West Coast by a firm
trading there, and also in the Malay Archipelago - prospecting, at a
heavy fee, to see whether it would pay the firm to open up
plantations there better than in Malaysia. I believe his final
judgment was adverse to the West African plan, because of the
difficulty of getting skilful natives to tend young plants, and
prepare the products. Tea he regarded as quite hopeless from this
difficulty, and he said he did not think you would ever get Africans
at as cheap a rate, or so deftly fingered to roll tea, as you can
get Asiatics. No one knows until they have tried it the trouble it
is to get an African to do things carefully; but it is a trouble,
not an impossibility. If you don't go off with fever from sheer
worry and vexation the thing can be done, but in the meantime he is
maddening. I have had many a day's work on plantations instructing
cheerful, willing, apparently intelligent Ethiopians of various
sexes and sizes on the mortal crime of hoeing up young coffee
plants. They have quite seen it. "Oh, Lor! massa, I no fit to do
dem thing." Aren't they! You go along to-morrow morning, and
you'll find your most promising pupils laying around them with their
hoes, talking about the disgraceful way their dearest friends go on,
and destroying young coffee right and left. They are just as bad,
if not slightly worse, particularly the ladies, when it comes to
picking coffee. As soon as your eye is off them, the bough is off
the tree. I know one planter who leads the life of the Surprise
Captain in W. H. S. Gilbert's ballad, lurking among his groves, and
suddenly appearing among his pickers. This, he says, has given them
a feeling of uncertainty as to when and where he may appear,
kassengo and all, that has done much to preserve his plantation; but
it is a wearying life, not what he expected from his book on coffee-
plantations, which had a frontispiece depicting a planter seated in
his verandah, with a tumblerful of something cool at his right hand,
and a pipe in his mouth, contemplating a large plantation full of
industrious natives picking berries into baskets on all sides.
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