The
Portino, A Steamer, Carried Back Fifty Of Them To Cadiz, Who Looked
When They Embarked More Like Living Skeletons
Of skin and bone than
animated human beings." {47} I quote this not to cast reproach on
the Spanish Government,
But merely to give a fact, a case in point,
of the deadly failure of endeavours to colonise on the West Coast, a
thing which is even now occasionally attempted, always with the same
sad results, though in most cases these attempts are now made by
religious but misinformed people under Bishop Taylor's mission.
The Spaniards did not entirely confine their attention to planting
colonists in a ready-made state on the island. As soon as they had
settled themselves and built their barracks and Government House,
they set to work and cleared away the bush for an area of from four
to six miles round the town. The ground soon became overgrown
again, but this clearing is still perceptible in the different type
of forest on it, and has enabled the gardens and little plantations
round Clarence to be made more easily. My Spanish friends assure me
that the Portuguese, who discovered the island in 1471, {48a} and
who exchanged it and Anno Bom in 1778 to the Spaniards for the
little island of Catalina and the colony of Sacramento in South
America, did not do anything to develop it. When they, the
Spaniards, first entered into possession they at once set to work to
colonise and clear. Then the colonisation scheme went to the bad,
the natives poisoned the wells, it is said, and the attention of the
Spaniards was in those days turned, for some inscrutable reason, to
the eastern shores of the island - a district now quite abandoned by
whites, on account of its unhealthiness - and they lost in addition
to the colonists a terrible quantity of their sailors, in Concepcion
Bay. {48b} A lull then followed, and the Spaniards willingly lent
the place to the English as aforesaid. They say we did nothing
except establish Clarence as a headquarters, which they consider to
have been a most excellent enterprise, and import the Baptist
Mission, which they hold as a less estimable undertaking; but there!
that's nothing to what the Baptist Mission hold regarding the
Spaniards. For my own part, I wish the Spaniards better luck this
time in their activity, for in directing it to plantations they are
on a truer and safer road to wealth than they have been with their
previous importations of Cuban political prisoners and ready-made
families of colonists, and I hope they will send home those
unfortunate wretches they have there now, and commence, in their
expected two years, to reap the profits of the coffee and cocoa.
Certainly the chances are that they may, for the soil of Fernando Po
is of exceeding fertility; Mr. Hutchinson says he has known Indian
corn planted here on a Monday evening make its appearance four
inches above ground on the following Wednesday morning, within a
period, he carefully says, of thirty-six hours.
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