Had I Not Learnt This
Very Thoroughly I Could Never Have Gone Out Again And Carried Out
The Voyage I Give You A Sketch Of In This Book.
Thanks to "the Agent," I have visited places I could never otherwise
have seen; and to the respect and affection in which he is held by
the native, I owe it that I have done so in safety.
When I have
arrived off his factory in a steamer or canoe unexpected,
unintroduced, or turned up equally unheralded out of the bush in a
dilapidated state, he has always received me with that gracious
hospitality which must have given him, under Coast conditions, very
real trouble and inconvenience - things he could have so readily
found logical excuses against entailing upon himself for the sake of
an individual whom he had never seen before - whom he most likely
would never see again - and whom it was no earthly profit to him to
see then. He has bestowed himself - Allah only knows where - on his
small trading vessels so that I might have his one cabin. He has
fished me out of sea and fresh water with boat-hooks; he has
continually given me good advice, which if I had only followed would
have enabled me to keep out of water and any other sort of
affliction; and although he holds the meanest opinion of my
intellect for going to such a place as West Africa for beetles,
fishes and fetish, he has given me the greatest assistance in my
work. The value of that work I pray you withhold judgment on, until
I lay it before you in some ten volumes or so mostly in Latin. All
I know that is true regarding West African facts, I owe to the
traders; the errors are my own.
To Dr. Gunther, of the British Museum, I am deeply grateful for the
kindness and interest he has always shown regarding all the
specimens of natural history that I have been able to lay before
him; the majority of which must have had very old tales to tell him.
Yet his courtesy and attention gave me the thing a worker in any
work most wants - the sense that the work was worth doing - and sent
me back to work again with the knowledge that if these things
interested a man like him, it was a more than sufficient reason for
me to go on collecting them. To Mr. W. H. F. Kirby I am much
indebted for his working out my small collection of certain Orders
of insects; and to Mr. Thomas S. Forshaw, for the great help he has
afforded me in revising my notes.
It is impossible for me even to catalogue my debts of gratitude
still outstanding to the West Coast. Chiefly am I indebted to Mr.
C. G. Hudson, whose kindness and influence enabled me to go up the
Ogowe and to see as much of Congo Francais as I have seen, and his
efforts to take care of me were most ably seconded by Mr. Fildes.
The French officials in "Congo Francais" never hindered me, and
always treated me with the greatest kindness. You may say there was
no reason why they should not, for there is nothing in this fine
colony of France that they need be ashamed of any one seeing; but I
find it is customary for travellers to say the French officials
throw obstacles in the way of any one visiting their possessions, so
I merely beg to state this was decidedly not my experience; although
my deplorable ignorance of French prevented me from explaining my
humble intentions to them.
The Rev. Dr. Nassau and Mr. R. E. Dennett have enabled me, by
placing at my disposal the rich funds of their knowledge of native
life and idea, to amplify any deductions from my own observation.
Mr. Dennett's work I have not dealt with in this work because it
refers to tribes I was not amongst on this journey, but to a tribe I
made the acquaintance with in my '93 voyage - the Fjort. Dr.
Nassau's observations I have referred to. Herr von Lucke, Vice-
governor of Cameroon, I am indebted to for not only allowing me, but
for assisting me by every means in his power, to go up Cameroons
Peak, and to the Governor of Cameroon, Herr von Puttkamer, for his
constant help and kindness. Indeed so great has been the
willingness to help me of all these gentlemen, that it is a wonder
to me, when I think of it, that their efforts did not project me
right across the continent and out at Zanzibar. That this brilliant
affair did not come off is owing to my own lack of enterprise; for I
did not want to go across the continent, and I do not hanker after
Zanzibar, but only to go puddling about obscure districts in West
Africa after raw fetish and fresh-water fishes.
I owe my ability to have profited by the kindness of these gentlemen
on land, to a gentleman of the sea - Captain Murray. He was captain
of the vessel I went out on in 1893, and he saw then that my mind
was full of errors that must be eradicated if I was going to deal
with the Coast successfully; and so he eradicated those errors and
replaced them with sound knowledge from his own stores collected
during an acquaintance with the West Coast of over thirty years.
The education he has given me has been of the greatest value to me,
and I sincerely hope to make many more voyages under him, for I well
know he has still much to teach and I to learn.
Last, but not least, I must chronicle my debts to the ladies. First
to those two courteous Portuguese ladies, Donna Anna de Sousa
Coutinho e Chichorro and her sister Donna Maria de Sousa Coutinho,
who did so much for me in Kacongo in 1893, and have remained, I am
proud to say, my firm friends ever since.
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