Near To The House Are The Sleeping Places For
The Beach Hands, And The Cook-House.
In front, in a position
commanded by the eye from the verandah, and well withdrawn from the
stockade, are great piles of billets of red bar wood.
The whole of
the clean, sandy yard containing these things, and divers others, is
surrounded by a stout stockade, its main face to the river frontage,
the water at high tide lapping its base, and at low tide exposing in
front of it a shore of black slime. Although I cite this factory as
a typical factory of a black trader, it is a specimen of the highest
class, for, being in connection with Messrs. Hatton and Cookson it
is well kept up and stocked. Firms differ much in this particular.
Messrs. Hatton and Cookson, like Messrs. Miller Brothers in the
Bights, take every care that lies in their power of the people who
serve them, down to the Kruboys working on their beaches, giving
ample and good rations and providing good houses. But this is not
so with all firms on the Coast. I have seen factories belonging to
the Swedish houses beside which this factory at Agonjo is a palace
although those factories are white man factories, and the
unfortunate white men in them are expected by these firms to live on
native chop - an expectation the Agents by no means realise, for they
usually die. Black hands, however, do not suffer much at the hands
of such firms, for the Swedish Agents are a quiet, gentlemanly set
of men, in the best sense of that much misused term, and they do not
employ on their beaches such a staff of black helpers as the English
houses, so the two or three Kruboys on a starvation beach can fairly
well fend for themselves, for there is always an adjacent village,
and in that village there are always chickens, and on the shore
crabs, and in the river fish, and for the rest of his diet the
Kruboy flirts with the local ladies.
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