More Convenient Fernando Po Certainly Was, But Not More Healthy, And
Ever Since 1827 It Has Been Accumulating For Itself
An evil
reputation for unhealthiness which is only languishing just at
present because there is an interval between its epidemics
- Fever in
Fernando Po, even more than on the mainland, having periodic
outbursts of a more serious type than the normal intermittent and
remittent of the Coast. Moreover, Fernando Po shares with Senegal
the undoubted yet doubtful honour of having had regular yellow
fever. In 1862 and 1866 this disease was imported by a ship that
had come from Havana. Since then it has not appeared in the
definite South American form, and therefore does not seem to have
obtained the foothold it has in Senegal, where a few years ago all
the money voted for the keeping of the Fete Nationale was in one
district devoted by public consent to the purchase of coffins,
required by an overwhelming outbreak of Yellow Jack.
In 1858 the Spanish Government thinking, presumably, that the slave
trade was suppressed enough, or at any rate to a sufficiently
inconvenient extent, re-claimed Fernando Po, to the horror of the
Baptist missionaries who had settled in Clarence apparently under
the erroneous idea that the island had been definitely taken over by
the English. This mission had received from the West African
Company a large grant of land, and had collected round it a
gathering of Sierra Leonians and other artisan and trading Africans
who were attracted to Clarence by the work made by the naval
station; and these people, with the English traders who also settled
here for a like reason, were the founders of Clarence Town. The
declaration of the Spanish Government stating that only Roman
Catholic missions would be countenanced caused the Baptists to
abandon their possessions and withdraw to the mainland in Ambas Bay,
where they have since remained, and nowadays Protestantism is
represented by a Methodist Mission which has a sub-branch on the
mainland on the Akwayafe River and one on the Qua Ibo.
The Spaniards, on resuming possession of the island, had one of
their attacks of activity regarding it, and sent out with Don Carlos
Chacon, who was to take over the command, four Jesuit priests, a
secretary, a commissariat officer, a custom-house clerk, and a
transport, the Santa Maria, with a number of emigrant families.
This attempt to colonise Fernando Po should have at least done the
good of preventing such experiments ever being tried again with
women and children, for of these unfortunate creatures - for whom, in
spite of its being the wet season, no houses had been provided - more
than 20 per cent. died in the space of five months. Mr. Hutchinson,
who was English Consul at the time, tells us that "In a very short
time gaunt figures of men, women, and children might be seen
crawling through the streets, with scarcely an evidence of life in
their faces, save the expression of a sort of torpid carelessness as
to how soon it might be their turn to drop off and die.
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