In This Great Region Of Swamps Every Mile Appears Like Every Other
Mile Until You Get Well Used To It,
And are able to distinguish the
little local peculiarities at the entrance of the rivers and in the
winding of
The creeks, a thing difficult even for the most
experienced navigator to do during those thick wool-like mists
called smokes, which hang about the whole Bight from November till
May (the dry season), sometimes lasting all day, sometimes clearing
off three hours after sunrise.
The upper or north-westerly part of the swamp is round the mouths of
the Niger, and it successfully concealed this fact from geographers
down to 1830, when the series of heroic journeys made by Mungo Park,
Clapperton, and the two Landers finally solved the problem - a
problem that was as great and which cost more men's lives than even
the discovery of the sources of the Nile.
That this should have been so may seem very strange to us who now
have been told the answer to the riddle; for the upper waters of
this great river were known of before Christ and spoken of by
Herodotus, Pliny and Ptolemy, and its mouths navigated continuously
along by the seaboard by trading vessels since the fifteenth
century, but they were not recognised as belonging to the Niger.
Some geographers held that the Senegal or the Gambia was its
outfall; others that it was the Zaire (Congo); others that it did
not come out on the West Coast at all, but got mixed up with the
Nile in the middle of the continent, and so on. Yet when you come
to know the swamps this is not so strange. You find on going up
what looks like a big river - say Forcados, two and a half miles wide
at the entrance and a real bit of the Niger. Before you are up it
far great, broad, business-like-looking river entrances open on
either side, showing wide rivers mangrove-walled, but two-thirds of
them are utter frauds which will ground you within half an hour of
your entering them. Some few of them do communicate with other main
channels to the great upper river, and others are main channels
themselves; but most of them intercommunicate with each other and
lead nowhere in particular, and you can't even get there because of
their shallowness. It is small wonder that the earlier navigators
did not get far up them in sailing ships, and that the problem had
to be solved by men descending the main stream of the Niger before
it commences to what we in Devonshire should call "squander itself
about" in all these channels. And in addition it must be remembered
that the natives with whom these trading vessels dealt, first for
slaves, afterwards for palm-oil, were not, and are not now, members
of the Lo family of savages. Far from it: they do not go in for
"gentle smiles," but for murdering any unprotected boat's crew they
happen to come across, not only for a love of sport but to keep
white traders from penetrating to the trade-producing interior, and
spoiling prices.
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