Plucking Up Courage He Went In
And Found What Was Left Of The White Agent, A Considerable Quantity
Of Rats, And Most Of The Flies In West Africa.
He then presumably
had fever, and he was taken off, a fortnight afterwards, by a French
boat, to whom the natives signalled, and he is not coming down the
Coast again.
Some men would have died right out from a shock like
this.
But most of the new-comers do not get a shock of this order. They
either die themselves or get more gradually accustomed to this sort
of thing, when they come to regard death and fever as soldiers, who
on a battle-field sit down, and laugh and talk round a camp fire
after a day's hard battle, in which they have seen their friends and
companions falling round them; all the time knowing that to-morrow
the battle comes again and that to-morrow night they themselves may
never see.
It is not hard-hearted callousness, it is only their way. Michael
Scott put this well in Tom Cringle's Log, in his account of the
yellow fever during the war in the West Indies. Fever, though the
chief danger, particularly to people who go out to settlements, is
not the only one; but as the other dangers, except perhaps domestic
poisoning, are incidental to pottering about in the forests, or on
the rivers, among the unsophisticated tribes, I will not dwell on
them. They can all be avoided by any one with common sense, by
keeping well out of the districts in which they occur; and so I warn
the general reader that if he goes out to West Africa, it is not
because I said the place was safe, or its dangers overrated.
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