Volume Ii Part 2 (2/2)
Whilst crossing the stream, we easily understood how the river was supposed to be in a perpetual state of inundation. The great breadth and the shallows near either jaw prevent the rain-floods being perceptible unless instruments are used, and ”hydrometry,”
still in an imperfect state, was little to be depended upon in the days when European ideas concerning the Congo River were formed. Twenty miles up stream the high-water mark becomes strongly marked, and further on, as will be seen, it shows even better.
If Barbot's map have any claim to correctness, the southern sh.o.r.e has changed greatly since A.D. 1700. A straight line from Cape Padro to Chapel Point, now Shark Point, was more than double the breadth of the embouchure. It is vain to seek for the ”Island of Calabes” mentioned by Andrew Battel, who was ”sent to a place called Zaire on the River Congo, to trade for elephants' teeth, wheat, and palm oil.” It may be a mistake for Cavallos, noticed in the next chapter; but the ”town on it” must have been small, and has left, they say, no traces. After a scramble through the surf, we were received at Shark Point, where, at this season, the current is nearer five than three knots, by Mr. Tom Peter, Maf.u.ka, or chief trader, amongst these ”Musurungus.” He bore his highly respectable name upon the frontal band of his ”berretta”
alias ”coroa,” an open-worked affair, very like the old-fas.h.i.+oned jelly-bag night cap. This head-gear of office made of pine-apple fibre-- Tuckey says gra.s.s--costs ten s.h.i.+llings; it is worn by the kinglets, who now distribute it to all the lieges whose fortunes exceed some fifty dollars.
Most of the Squaline villagers appeared to be women, the men being engaged in making money elsewhere. Besides illicit trade, which has now become very dangerous, a little is done in the licit line: grotesquely carved sticks, calabashes rudely ornamented with s.h.i.+ps and human figures, the neat bead-work gra.s.s-strings used by the women to depress the bosom, and cas.h.i.+mbos or pipes mostly made about Boma. All were re-baptized in 1853, but they show no sign of Christianity save crosses, and they are the only prost.i.tutes on the river.
Following Tom Peter, and followed by a noisy tail, we walked to the west end of Shark Point, to see if aught remained of the Padro, the first memorial column, planted in 1485 by the explorer Diogo Cam, knight of the king's household, Dom Joo II.
”O principe perfeito,” who, says De Barros (”Asia,” Decad. I.
lib. iii. chap. 3), ”to immortalize the memory of his captains,”
directed them to plant these pillars in all remarkable places.
The Padres, which before the reign of D. Joo were only wooden crosses, a.s.sumed the shape of ”columns, twice the height of a man (estado), with the scutcheon bearing the royal arms. At the sides they were to be inscribed in Latin and Portuguese (to which James Barbot adds Arabic), with the name of the monarch who sent the expedition, the date of discovery, and the captain who made it; on the summit was to be raised a stone cross cramped in with lead.” According to others, the inscription mentioned only the date, the king, and the captain. The Padro of the Congo was especially called from the ”Lord of Guinea's favourite saint, de So Jorge”--sit faustum! As Carli shows, the patron of Congo and Angola was Santiago, who was seen bodily a.s.sisting at a battle in which Dom Affonso, son of Giovi (Emmanuel), first Christian king of Congo, prevailed against a mighty host of idolaters headed by his pagan brother ”Panso Aquitimo.” In 1786 Sir Home Popham found a marble cross on a rock near Angra dos Ilheos or Pequena (south lat.i.tude 26 37'), with the arms of Portugal almost effaced. Till lately the jasper pillar at Cabo Negro bore the national arms.
Doubtless much lat.i.tude was allowed in the make and material of these padres; that which I saw near Cananea in the Brazil is of saccharine marble, four palms high by two broad; it bears a scutcheon charged with a cross and surmounted by another.
There is some doubt concerning the date of this mission. De Barros (I. iii. 3) says A.D. 1484. Lopes de Limn (IV. i. 5) gives the reason why A.D. 1485 is generally adopted, and he believes that the cruise of the previous year did not lead to the Congo River. The explorer, proceeding to inspect the coast south of Cape St. Catherine (south lat.i.tude 2 30'), which he had discovered in 1473, set out from So Jorge da Mina, now Elmina.
He was accompanied by Martin von Behaim of Nurnberg (nat. circ.
A.D. 1436, ob. A.D. 1506), a pupil of the mathematician John Muller (Regiomonta.n.u.s); and for whom the discovery of the New World has been claimed.
After doubling his last year's terminus, Diogo Cam chanced upon a vast embouchure, and, surprised by the beauty of the scenery and the volume of the stream, he erected his stone Padro, the first of its kind. Finding the people unintelligible to the interpreters, he sent four of his men with a present of hawk's bells (cascaveis) and blue gla.s.s beads to the nearest king, and, as they did not soon return, he sailed back to Portugal with an equal number of natives as hostages, promising to return after fifteen moons. One of them, Cacuta (Zacuten of Barbot), proved to be a ”fidalgo” of Sonho, and, though the procedure was contrary to orders, it found favour with the ”Perfect Prince.” From these men the Portuguese learned that the land belonged to a great monarch named the Mwani-Congo or Lord of Congo, and thus they gave the river a name unknown to the riverine peoples.
Diogo Cam, on his second visit, sent presents to the ruler with the hostages, who had learned as much Portuguese and Christianity as the time allowed; recovered his own men, and pa.s.sed on to Angola, Benguela and Cabo Negro, adding to his discoveries 200 leagues of coast. When homeward bound, he met the Mwani-Sonho, and visited the Mwani-Congo, who lived at Amba.s.se Congo (So Salvador), distant 50 leagues (?). The ruler of the ”great and wonderful River Zaire,” touched by his words, sent with him sundry youths, and the fidalgo Cacuta, who was baptized into Dom Joao, to receive instruction, and to offer a present of ivory and of palm cloth which was remarkably strong and bright. A request for a supply of mechanics and missionaries brought out the first mission of Dominicans. They sailed in December, 1490, under Goncalo de Sousa; they were followed by others, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the country was fairly over- run by the Propaganda. A future page will enter into more details, and show the results of their labours.
The original Padro was destroyed by the Dutch in 1645, an act of barbarism which is justly called ”Vandalica facanha.” Father Merolla says (1682), ”The Hollanders, out of envy, broke the fine marble cross to pieces; nevertheless, so much remained of it, when I was there, as to discover plainly the Portuguese arms on the ruins of the basis, with an inscription under them in Gothic characters, though not easy to be read.” In 1859 a new one was placed in Turtle Cove, a few yards south-west of Shark Point; but the record was swept away by an unusually high tide, and no further attempt has been made.
We were then led down a sandy narrow line in the bush, striking south-east, and, after a few yards, we stood before two pieces of marble in a sandy hollow. The tropical climate, more adverse than that of London, had bleached and marked them till they looked like pitted chalk: the larger stump, about two feet high, was bandaged, as if after amputation, with cloths of many colours, and the other fragment lay at its feet. Tom Peter, in a fearful lingua-Franca, Negro-Anglo-Portuguese, told us that his people still venerated the place as part of a religious building; it is probably the remnant thus alluded to by Lopes de Lima (iii. 1-6): ”Behind this point (Padro) is another monument of the piety of our monarchs, and of the holy objects which guided them to the conquest of Guinea, a Capuchin convent intended to convert the negroes of Sonho; it has long been deserted, and is still so.
Even in A.D. 1814, D. Garcia V., the king of Congo, complained in a letter to our sovereign of the want of missionaries.” Possibly the ruined convent is the church which we shall presently visit.
Striking eastward, we soon came to a pool in the bush sufficiently curious and out of place to make the natives hold it ”Fetish;” they declare that it is full of fish, but it kills all men who enter it--”all men” would not include white men. Possibly it is an old piscina; according to the Abbe Proyart, the missionaries taught the art of pisciculture near the village of Kilonga, where they formed their first establishment. The place is marked ”Salt-pond” in Barbot, who tells us that the condiment was made there and carried inland.
A short walk to a tall tree backing the village showed us, amongst twenty-five European graves, five tombs or cenotaphs of English naval officers, amongst whom two fell victims to mangrove-oysters, and the rest to the deadly ”calenture” of the lower Congo. We entered the foul ma.s.s of huts,
”Domus non ullo robore fulta Sed sterili junco cannaque intecta pal.u.s.tri.”
It was too early for the daily debauch of palm wine, and the interiors reeked with the odours of nocturnal palm oil. The older travellers were certainly not blases; they seemed to find pleasure and beauty wherever they looked: Ca da Mosto (1455), visiting the Senegal, detected in this graveolent substance, fit only for wheel-axles, a threefold property, that of smelling like violets, of tasting like oil of olives, and tinging victuals like saffron, with a colour still finer. Even Mungo Park preferred the rancid tallow-like shea b.u.t.ter to the best product of the cow. We chatted with the Shark Point wreckers, and found that they thought like Arthegal,
”For equal right in equal things doth stand.”
Moreover, here, as in the Shetlands of the early nineteenth century, when the keel touches bottom the seaman loses his rights, and she belongs to the sh.o.r.e.
Tom Peter offered to show us other relics of the past if we would give him two days. A little party was soon made up, Mr. J. C.
Bigley, the master, and Mr. Richards, the excellent gunner of the ”Griffon,” were my companions. We set out in a south-by-easterly direction to the bottom of Sonho, or Diogo's Bay, which Barbot calls ”Bay of Pampus Rock.” Thence we entered Alligator River, a broad lagoon, the Raphael Creek of Maxwell's map, not named in the hydrographic chart of 1859. Leading south with many a bend, it is black water and thick, fetid mud, garnished with scrubby mangrove, where Kru-boys come to cut fuel and catch fever; here the dew seemed to fall in cold drops. After nine miles we reached a shallow fork, one tine of which, according to our informants, comes from the Congo Grande, or So Salvador, distant a week's march. Leaving the whaler in charge of a Kru-man, we landed, and walked about half a mile over loose sand bound by pine-apple root, to the Banza Sonho, or, as we call it, King Antonio's Town- -not to be mistaken for that placed in the charts behind Point Padron. Our object being unknown, there was fearful excitement in the thatched huts scattered under the palm grove, till Tom Peter introduced us, and cleared for us a decent hut. The buildings, if they can be so called, are poor and ragged, copies of those which we shall see upon the uplands. Presently we were visited by the king named after that saint ”of whom the Evil One was parlous afraid.” This descendant of the ”Counts of Sonho,” in his dirty night-cap and long coat of stained red cloth, was a curious contrast to the former splendour of the ”count's habit,” with cap of st.i.tched silk which could be worn only by him and his n.o.bles, fine linen s.h.i.+rt, flowered silk cloak, and yellow stockings of the same material. When King Affonso III. gave audience to the missioners (A.D. 1646), the negro grandee ”had on a vest of cloth set with precious stones, and in his hat a crown of diamonds, besides other stones of great value. He sat on a chair under a canopy of rich crimson velvet, with gilt nails, after the manner of Europe; and under his feet was a great carpet, with two stools of the same colour, and silk laced with gold.” After the usual palaver we gave the black earl a cloth and bottle of rum for leave to pa.s.s on, but no one would accompany us that evening, all pretending that they wanted time to fit up the hammocks. At night a body of armed bushmen marched down to inspect us.
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