Volume I Part 2 (2/2)
The gorilla-hunter's sketch had always reminded me of the Rev.
Mr. Moffat's account of the Hylobian Bakones, the aborigines of the Matabele country. Mr. Thompson, a missionary to Sherbro (”The Palm Land,” chap. xiii), has, however, these words:--”It is said of the chimpanzees, that they build a kind of rude house of sticks in their wild state, and fill it with leaves; and I doubt it not, for when domesticated they always want some good bed, and make it up regularly.”
Thus I come to the conclusion that the Nchigo Mpolo is a vulgar nest-building ape. The bushmen and the villagers all a.s.sured me that neither the common chimpanzee, nor the gorilla proper (Troglodytes gorilla), ”make 'im house.” On the other hand, Mr.
W. Winwood Reade, writing to ”The Athenaeum” from Loanda (Sept. 7, 1862), a.s.serts,--”When the female is pregnant he (the gorilla) builds a nest (as do also the Kulu-Kamba and the chimpanzee), where she is delivered, and which is then abandoned.” And he thus confirms what was told to Dr. Thomas Savage (1847): ”In the wild state their (i.e. the gorillas') habits are in general like those of the Troglodytes niger, building their nests loosely in trees.”
Chapter III.
Geography of the Gaboon.
Before going further afield I may be allowed a few observations, topographical and ethnological, about this highly interesting section of the West African coast.
The Gaboon country, to retain the now familiar term, although no one knows much about its derivation, is placed, by old travellers in ”South Guinea,” the tract lying along the Ethiopic, or South Atlantic Ocean, limited by the Camarones Mountain-block in north lat.i.tude 4, and by Cabo Negro in south lat.i.tude 15 40' 7”, a sea-line of nearly 1,200 miles. The Gaboon proper is included between the Camarones Mountains to the north, and the ”Mayumba,”properly the ”Yumba” country southwards, in south lat.i.tude 3 22',--a sh.o.r.e upwards of 400 miles long. The inland depth is undetermined; geographically we should limit it to the Western Ghats, which rarely recede more than 60 miles from the sea, and ethnologically no line can yet be drawn. The country is almost bisected by the equator, and by the Rio de Gabo, which discharges in north lat.i.tude 0 21' 25” and east longitude 9 21'
23”; and it corresponds in parallel with the Somali-Galla country and the Juba River on the east coast.
The general aspect of the region is prepossessing. It is a rolling surface sinking towards the Atlantic, in parts broken by hills and dwarf chains, either detached or pushed out by the Ghats; a land of short and abnormally broad rivers, which cannot, like the Congo, break through the ridges flanking the Central African basin, and which therefore are mere surface drains of the main ranges. The soil is mostly sandy, but a thin coat of rich vegetable humus, quickened by heavy rains and fiery suns, produces a luxuriant vegetation; whilst the proportion of area actually cultivated is nothing compared with the expanse of bush.
In the tall forests, which abound in wild fruits, there are beautiful tracts of clear gra.s.sy land, and the woods, clear of undergrowth, resemble an English grove more than a tropical jungle. Horses, which die of the tsetse (Glossina morsitans) in the interior of North Guinea, and of damp heat at Fernando Po, thrive on its downs and savannahs. The Elais palm is rare, sufficing only for home use. The southern parts, about Cape Lopez and beyond it, resemble the Oil River country in the Biafran Bight: the land is a ma.s.s of mangrove swamps, and the climate is unfit for white men.
The Eastern Ghats were early known to the ”Iberians,” as shown by the Sierra del Crystal, del Sal, del Sal Nitro and other names, probably so called from the abundance of quartz in blocks and veins that seam the granite, as we shall see in the Congo country, and possibly because they contain rock crystal. Although in many places they may be descried subtending the sh.o.r.e in lumpy lines like detached vertebrae, and are supposed to represent the Aranga Mons of Ptolemy, they are not noticed by Barbot. Between the Camarones River and Cape St. John (Coris...o...b..y), blue, rounded, and discontinuous ma.s.ses, apparently wooded, rise before the mariner, and form, as will be seen, the western sub-ranges of the great basin-rim. To the north they probably anastomose with the Camarones, the Rumbi, the Kwa, the Fumbina north-east, and the Niger-Kong mountains.[FN#5]
They are not wanting who declare them to be rich in precious metals. Some thirty years ago an American super-cargo ascended the Rembwe River, the south-eastern line of the Gaboon fork, and is said to have collected ”dirt” which, tested at New York, produced 16 dollars per bushel. All the old residents in the Gaboon know the story of the gold dust. The prospector was the late Captain Richard E. Lawlin, of New York, who was employed by Messrs. Bishop of Philadelphia, the same house that commissioned the cha.s.seur de gorilles to collect ”rubber” for them, and who was so eminently useful to the young French traveller that the scant notice of his name is considered curious.
Great would be my wonder if the West African as well as the East African Ghats did not prove auriferous; both fulfil all the required conditions, and both await actual discovery. The Mountains of the Moon, so frequently mentioned by M. du Chaillu and the Gaboon Mission, are doubtless the versants between the valleys of the Niger and the Congo. Lately Dr. Schweinfurth found an equatorial range which, stretching northwards towards the Bahr el Ghazal, was seen to trend westward. According to Mr. Consul Hutchinson (”Ten Years' Wanderings among the Ethiopians,” p.
250), the Rev. Messrs. Mackey and Clemens, of the Corisco Mission ”explored more than a hundred miles of country across the Sierra del Crystal Range of Mountains” --I am inclined to believe that a hundred miles from the coast was their furthest point. We shall presently travel towards this mysterious range, and there is no difficulty in pa.s.sing it, except the utter want of a commercial road, and the wildness of tribes that have never sighted a traveller nor a civilized man.
The rivers of our region are of three kinds; little surface drains princ.i.p.ally in the north; broad estuaries like the Mersey and many streams of Eastern Scotland in the central parts, and a single bed, the Ogobe, breaking through the subtending Ghats, and forming a huge lagoon-delta. Beginning at Camarones are the Boroa and Borba Waters, with the Rio de Campo, fifteen leagues further south; of these little is known, except that they fall into the Bight of Panari or Pannaria.
According to Barbot (iv. 9), the English charts give the name of Point Pan to a large deep bight in which lies the harbour-bay ”Porto de Garapo” (Garapa, sugar-cane juice?); and he calls the two rounded hillocks, extending inland from Point Pan to the northern banks of the Rio de Campo, ”Navia.” The un-African word Panari or Pannaria is probably a corruption of Pao de Nao, the bay north of Garapo, and ”Navia.”
These small features are followed by the Rio de So Bento, improperly called in our charts the St. Benito, Bonito, Bonita, and Boneto; the native name is Lobei, and it traverses the Kombi country, --such is the extent of our information. The next is the well-known Muni, the Ntambounay of M. du Chaillu, generally called the Danger River, in old charts ”Rio de So Joo,” and ”Rio da Angra” (of the bight); an estuary which, like most of its kind, bifurcates above, and, receiving a number of little tributaries from the Sierra, forms a broad bed and empties itself through a ma.s.s of mangroves into the innermost north-eastern corner of Coris...o...b..y. This sag in the coast is formed by Ninje (Nenge the island?), or the Cabo de So Joo (Cape St. John) to the north, fronted south by a large square-headed block of land, whose point is called Cabo das Esteiras--of matting (Barbot's Estyras), an article of trade in the olden time. The southern part receives the Munda (Moondah) river, a foul and unimportant stream, which has been occupied by the American missionaries.
We shall ascend the Gaboon estuary to its sources. South of it, a number of sweet little water-courses break the sh.o.r.e-line as far as the Nazareth River, which debouches north of Urungu, or Cape Lopez (Cabo de Lopo Gonsalvez), and which forms by anastomosing with a southern river the Ogobe (Ogowai of M. du Chaillu), a complicated delta whose sea-front extends from north to south, at least eighty miles. Beyond Cape Lopez is an outfall, known to Europeans as the Rio Mexias: it is apparently a mesh in the net- work of the Nazareth-Ogobe. The same may be said of the Rio Ferno Vaz, about 110 miles south of the Gaboon, and of yet another stream which, running lagoon-like some forty miles along the sh.o.r.e, has received in our maps the somewhat vague name of R.
Rembo or River River. Orembo (Simpongwe) being the generic term for a stream or river, is applied emphatically to the Nkomo branch of the Gaboon, and to the Ferno Vaz.
The Ogobe is the only river between the Niger and the Congo which escapes, through favouring depressions, from the highlands flanking the great watery plateau of Inner Africa. By its plainly marked double seasons of flood at the equinoxes, and by the time of its low water, we prove that it drains the belt of calms, and the region immediately upon the equator. The explorations of Lieutenant Serval and others, in ”Le Pionnier” river-steamer, give it an average breadth of 8,200 feet, though broken by sand- banks and islands; the depth in the main channel, which at times is narrow and difficult to find, averages between sixteen and forty-eight feet; and, in the dry season of 1862, the vessel ran up sixty English miles.
Before M. du Chaillu's expeditions, ”the rivers known to Europeans,” he tells us in his Preface (”First Journey,” p. iv.), ”as the Nazareth, Mexias, and Fernam Vaz, were supposed to be three distinct streams.” In 1817 Bowdich identified the ”Ogoowai”
with the Congo, and the Rev. Mr. Wilson (p. 284) shows us the small amount of knowledge that existed even amongst experts, five years before the ”Gorilla book” appeared. ”From Cape Lopez, where the Nazareth debouches, there is a narrow lagoon running along the sea-coast, and very near to it, all the way to Mayumba. This lagoon is much traversed by boats and canoes, and, when the slave-trade was in vigorous operation, it afforded the Portuguese traders great facilities for eluding the vigilance of British cruizers, by s.h.i.+fting their slaves from point to point, and embarking them, according to a preconcerted plan.”
M. du Chaillu first proved that the Ogobe was formed by two forks, the northern, or Rembo Okanda, and the southern, or Rembo Nguye. The former is the more important. Mr. R.S.N. Walker found this stream above the confluence to be from 1,800 to 2,100 feet wide, though half the bed was occupied by bare sand-banks. Higher up, where rocks and rapids interfered with the boat-voyage, the current was considerable, but the breadth diminished to 600 feet.
The southern branch (also written Ngunie) was found in Apono Land (S. lat. 2), about the breadth of the Thames at London Bridge, 700 feet. In June the depth was ten to fifteen feet, to which the rainy season added ten.
M. du Chaillu also established the facts that the Nazareth river was the northern arm of the Delta, and that the Ferno Vaz anastomosed with the Delta's southern arm.
The only pelagic islands off the Gaboon coast are the Brancas, Great and Little; Corisco Island, which we shall presently visit; Great and Little Elobi, called by old travellers Mosquito Islands, probably for ”Moucheron,” a Dutchman who lost his s.h.i.+p there in 1600. The land about the mouths of the Ogobe is a ma.s.s of mangrove swamps, like the Nigerian Delta, which high tides convert into insular ground; these, however, must be considered terra firma in its infancy. The riverine islands of the Gaboon proper will be noticed as we ascend the bed.
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