Chapter I: Preliminaries of Exploration (1)

There are few spots on the earth’s surface where more of grace and grandeur, of beauty and sublimity, are found blended in one noble panorama than at the equatorial approach on the west coast of Africa. The voyager’s eye, fatigued by the low, flat, melancholy shores of Benin and Upper Biafra, rests with inexhaustible delight upon a ‘Gate,’ compared with which Bab el-Mandeb and the Pillars of Hercules are indeed tame. To his right towers Santa Isabel, the Peak of Fernando Po, marked in the chart as 10,700 feet above sea-level: on his left is a geographical feature more stupendous still, where the Camaroons Mountain, whose height is popularly laid down at 13,760 feet, seems to spring from the wave, and to cast its shadow half-way across the narrow intervening channel, whose minimum breadth does not exceed nineteen miles. They are evidently sister formations, these giant pyramids; they wear a family look; their shoulders, clad in flowing garments of evergreen vegetation, converge gradually, and almost continuously, at an angle of about 12°, till they meet at a neck upon which a superimposed conical head denotes the great central spiracle.[5] In the island, however, superior humidity prolongs the woody region, whilst the continental mountain, some 3000 feet more elevated, shows a greater expanse of grassy surface clear of high trees. Remarkable also is the variety of the scene, which is rarely beheld under the same aspect. Now, through the thin grey haze of the fair season which paints all Nature with its own hues, they rise like spectres from the ‘vapour foot’ below, the umbras of mountains in the shadowy realm. Then they disappear mysteriously behind a dense, dark loom, affording at times a glimpse through the festoons and hangings of mist and cloud that are caught and held by the rough, tree-clad surface. Then, especially after tornado- rains, profile and fold stand out with a marvellous distinctness that brings them within a quarter of their real distance. Their waists, where the North-east Trade and the South-west Rain-winds meet, are often girt with a sharply-defined, delicate zone of sea-cloud, cumuloni-rollers, snow-white when shone upon by the sun, below in strata, which, forming a new base for the upper half, show an Ossa piled upon many a Pelion: a lower girdle of land-cloud is also not unfrequent, while fleecy little cirri dance like aërial sprites over the Peak. And sometimes upon the further summit of the Camaroons Mountain, a broad sheet, distance- dwarfed to a mere fleck, of a dead and absolute white, which cannot be confounded with cloud, lava, or dolomite, tells of snow within four degrees of the equator. But the time to behold it is when there is a cloudless sky: in the soft and misty air its hues are so fresh, so melting, so tender, that it is a sensual enjoyment to gaze upon them. Then the channel, crisped and freshened by the remnants of the Northern Trades, winds beautifully blue between them; and the monarchs of West African mountains throned in sapphire, all gorgeous purple below, passing into the lightest azure above, raise toward the empyrean their heads jewelled with the gold of a tropical sunshine. Such a picture can never fade from the memory of man.

And there are marvels and wonders connected with them, especially with the unexplored Camaroons.[6] This is the only point of the West African coast still presenting the same features described in the log-book of Hanno the Carthaginian—the admiral, general, historian, and first of lion-tamers.

For long centuries navigators have sailed along its base, but no foot has ever ventured to tread that little hump, which, as in the Pico of Tenerife, denotes the apex. Portuguese and Spaniard, Dutch, English, and French, have all been contented to wonder and to admire from afar this great landmark of the western shores. The coast-people declare that they have seen fire bursting out of the ground; and from Clarence Town in Fernando Po smoke has been observed more than once to issue from the summit of the ‘Mount of Heaven,’ as they call the Theon Ochema, upon which, 600 years before our era, the old Carthaginians gazed in fear. In the pages of a contemporary writer upon the West Coast of Africa, its uplands narrowly escaped being garnished with a race of Dokos and Kimos, dwarfs and pigmies, and _hommes à queue_, the mysterious Ding-Dings and Nyam-Nyams.

Having left pestilential Lagos on the 21st November, 1861, in H.M.S. ‘Bloodhound,’ Lieut.-Commander Dolben, R.N., after visiting the dull and deadly Brass and Bonny rivers I determined to refresh myself with a nearer view of the Camaroons Mountain, and to prospect the chances of carrying out a long-cherished project of exploring it. As we approached the goal on the dawn of the 10th December, a jealous cloud, like the vapour which further north invests Madeira and the Canaries, seemed resolved to hide its majesty from our eyes. Before sunrise, however, every stain of mist had, as frequently happens, disappeared. For a distance of ten miles a huge blue silhouette stood before us, the upper heights gilt by the yet unrisen sun, and the lower expanse still blue- black with lingering night. The dorsal swell was everywhere so regular that it gave to the whole the appearance of one vast mountain rising from a single base. Every quarter of an hour, however, brought a change in the magnificent spectacle. Presently the south-western profile was broken by three serrations; the highest is the uppermost of a group, to which we afterwards gave the name of the Three Sisters; below it was an extinct Vesuvius, the Little Camaroons of old sailors, surging apparently impracticable and perpendicular from a rolling sea of vegetation; lower still was the Botoki cone, a small but independent feature, clearly seen from Fernando Po; and in the maritime region hummocky hills and dromedary’s backs here formed headlands, heaving out in accumulative grandeur from the Atlantic, whose mighty swell, slow and measured, broke at their feet, there sank blended with the winding, waving shore, that dipped below the misty horizon. With the increased clearness of morning, we began to understand that what we had supposed to be a plain surface of tropical forest in the lower basal half, is a succession of long striated ridges, with intervening barrancas, valleys, and ravines; whilst the dots, which had before puzzled us, were wooded protuberances,—‘parasitic’ cones they are called by those who would quiet their consciences with a technical word.[7] Higher up we could distinctly trace the line where the forest region yields to that of grass and shrubs: there again appeared a multitude of little lumps, an eruption of warts upon the epidermis of the giant; they looked like mole-hills from below; above they will become sugar-loaves, bosses, and ‘volcanic blowing cones,’ like the ‘_hornitos_’ or oven-shaped hillocks speckling the Mal Pais plain of Mexican Jorullo. And the terminal domelet, evidently bald and bare, wore, when the first delicate rays of the rosy sun had faded from it, a brown-black, tempered by the intervening blue, but contrasting strongly with the reddish-yellow which winter, or rather the dry season, had already strewed upon the grass- slopes beneath it. As we steamed into the beautiful Ambas, or Victoria Bay, with its protecting islets on our right hand, all admired, after the mangrove-haunted river, the sublimity and the passing loveliness of the scene; above our heads the noble pile capped with its fissured cupola; before us the dwarf earth-banks and the beetling cliffs that margined the mirrory sea, and the forest with its infinite tintage, here ruddy, there almost white, now dark as spinach, then of the lightest leek-green. Some compared it to Navarino Bay, others to the once young and charming Sierra Leone, as she appears in pictures, before fire had wasted the now deadly land. It is fortunate that the devils of this paradise have not yet learned, like the Timni and their brethren the ‘colonists,’ to disforest the soil; when the operation of bush-clearing is carried out, care should be taken to leave all the finest trees standing.

Running with an easterly course, we passed a detached rock which we called ‘The Hulk’—_prosit!_ Beyond it, at the foot of the Botoki cone, where Capt. Allen places his Batoki village,[8] appeared the Point Limboh of our maps, a rugged, forested head, forming the north-west buttress of Ambas Bay. We then fronted a green and shaggy amphitheatre, which apparently had no break nor outlet, and soon afterwards we found it composed of two shallow rocky waves in the coast, the further cove being our destination. On the port-bow rose, needle-like, from the waves, sheer and steep-to, the Bubyá Islands, ridiculously enough called the Pirate Rocks; the distinctly columnar shape of these pinnacled ‘inches,’ the fornos, souffleurs, or blowing-holes, in their bases and their water-worn arches revealed a basaltic formation. Continuing our course in ¼ less 10 fathoms, we left on the starboard bow Ndami, miscalled Ambas, or Amboize Island, a long, narrow chine of black rock, partially greened over and dotted at the northern and western ends with about a dozen huts; a violent surf, urged by the south-west winds, breaks around it during the rainy season. We then passed northward of ‘Mondoleh,’ or rather ‘Mondori,’ Island, which is defended in this direction by outlying rocks and reefs. It is an egg-shaped rock, woody and shady, bluff towards the north, and sloping seawards in the south. It appeared to all of us the best preparatory position for a sanitarium, and as such I shall revert to it.

Presently, at 11 A.M., we anchored in three fathoms water off the mouth of Morton Cove, so called from a certain patron of the Baptist Mission. This north-eastern and innermost recess of Ambas Bay, being completely land-locked towards the weather, must offer, one would suppose, at all seasons an excellent station to boats. The southern part is shoal and sandy, and the bottom is dotted with diabolitos with basaltic points, sometimes covered by the tide, and making it a dangerous anchorage for ships. In the Hydrographic Chart the dimensions of the chord of Morton Cove are unduly reduced. It supplies an abundance of the purest water: a little perennial stream falls into the centre of the arc; the heights are covered with noble timber; there is an abundance of building material, stone being as common as in Madeira and Tenerife; whilst specimens of coralline brought up by the fishermen show that here, as at San Thomé, the growth of madrepore would supply the settlement with lime. And there is a walk round the cove over a soft dark sand, formed, like that of Fernando Po, by a detritus of basalt about a mile and a half long and, at low water, fifty yards wide.

The good ship lay about eight hundred yards W.S.W. of the Missionary station Victoria, and thus commanded a fine view of the site where the future town will be. The position is a broken uneven ledge, formed by alluvium from the mountains almost immediately behind it, and extending from one to two miles towards the sea bounding it on the south. Within an easy walk of two hours, and bearing 65° E.N.E. from the Mission House, is a rounded tree-clad cone, called by the Baptists Mount Henry; this would be the second step towards the upper sanitarium, to which—suddenness of change often induces a relapse of fever in these exceedingly tropical lands,—patients should not be conveyed too rapidly. Immediately behind the settlement is a gorgeous and gigantic growth of equatorial forest, which would require to be cleared or thinned before aught else could be done; at present it is almost impassable during the rains, and at all seasons it breeds swarms of sandflies and mosquitos. The dwarf enclosure which backs the houses runs about half a mile each way, and might grow to half a dozen times the size. At present there are ten habitations, two of iron and the rest of timber. The three of superior appearance fronting the sea command a fine view of the bay- islets, the densely wooded promontories, and the rival peak of Fernando Po, springing gnomon-like from the bosom of the ocean. Opposite the principal abode, the Mission House, are scattered rocks, forming a natural breakwater, which could easily be converted into a pier. This was proposed some twenty years ago, but Africa moves even more slowly than England—not a stone has been laid. The walls are dry lines of basaltic blocks and boulders, which everywhere strew the surface; there is also good clay for bricks. About three-quarters of a mile from, and appearing to command the settlement, is Mount Helen, a finely wooded cliff, admirably fitted for the site of a convict prison; it is a dangerous rocky point in windy weather, and at all times the surf is bad. On the sandstrip below, and east of the mission establishment, are long cadjan’d sheds, used as boat-houses and places of barter; in the Admiralty Chart the place is marked ‘Plantain market on Fridays.’ Here on every third day the islanders and the savages from the upper slopes meet to change their fruits and vegetables, chiefly cocoas and yams, palm-nuts and bananas, for salt, tobacco, small wares, and dried fish of various kinds, the chief demand of the interior. About two miles to the eastward is a second hamlet, which can be reached either by footpath or by canoe; it is also held every third day, and the articles of ‘round trade’ are the same. A local feud—one is prevailing now—often breaks off the ‘bazar’ for weeks; faction-fights with stones are not uncommon; and when the Bimbia people from the east kidnap a woman or two the upper clans fear to descend. In the best of times only a few pounds of provisions are procurable at these markets. It is evident that a colony landing at Victoria should be supplied with frame houses and rations[9] until with reasonable industry it could support itself. The reader must not readily credit the various assertions recklessly made touching the quantity of provisions at Victoria. On the other hand, as freight is easily brought from the neighbouring rivers Bimbia and Camaroons, it is not likely that the Victorians, like the tars of the Elizabethan navy, are always raising, as their rivals declare, the pitiful cry, ‘Vittels! vittels! vittels!’ As will presently appear, there is great fierceness between the two rival settlements; though the battle for bread does not rage fiercely in these bilious lands, yet the only amity lies in community of interests, and none but a stranger—like myself—would attempt to speak out the truth.

Lieutenant Dolben and I, embarking in the first gig, despised the fine- weather passage leading towards the site of the future pier. We crossed in safety the little angry bar, and landed on a shingly beach, narrow as usual: on this part of the African coast there are none of the broad yellow sands that beautify the edges of the Asiatic seas. Then we walked a few yards to the rock-garnished mouth of a second little river which bounds the missionary clearing on the west. It is a mountain-burn, the drainage of the uplands, but a few yards wide, and barely chin-deep; it is, however, perennial, and extraordinarily sweet; ever cool in the hottest season, and overarched with shady trees, which require nothing but clearing. The bottom is neatly spread with pebbles of black basalt, all more or less porous; red volcanic stones and scoriæ, well rounded and water-rolled. It is a delightful bath for those who can despise threats of fever, and it is the model of a trout stream, although we saw in it only the smallest of fry.

After bathing and giving orders to fill casks, we walked towards the settlement, which is not more than three hundred yards from the stream, and were presently met by Messrs. Diboll and Mann, who showed us the narrow path through the bush. The Rev. Mr. Saker was then at his head- quarters on the Camaroons River, of which this establishment is an outpost; we therefore paid a short visit to his amiable family, and then departed.

I had arrived, however, at an apparently auspicious moment for my long- cherished project. M. Mann in 1860 had ascended a few hundred feet of the Camaroons mountains, but having lacked time, and perhaps having overestimated the difficulties, he had returned unsatisfied to Fernando Po, and he was now girding his loins for a second attempt to scale a mountain whose glorious pinnacles had never felt the foot of man.[10] He is a young man of twenty-five, a native of Brunswick, a gardener from the Royal Gardens, Kew, to which he was recommended by the Court of Hanover. Originally attached, in 1859, to Dr. Baikie’s Niger expedition in place of the lamented Dr. Barter, he has been continued as Government botanist in West Africa by the Admiralty, with the ostensible motive of inspecting the timber. The ‘Amabilis scientia’—whose votaries, however, can at times be as cross as poets—appears still at a discount in public opinion. Whilst in these days the geologist holds his head high, one rarely reads of a detached ‘botaniker;’ as a rule the ‘poor herbalist’ is attached as a decent appendage to some Government expedition. Economy is often made to entrench upon utility. And why should the collector, after bearing the heat and burden of the day, lose his reward? Why should not ‘Hooker’s Niger Flora’ be known as ‘Vogel’s Herbarium described by Hooker’? And yet another point. Why should not the collector be allowed to reserve a certain percentage of new plants to study and to name after his friends? We are certainly afflicted in this century with a terrible thirst for small fame, but it is a pity that justice should be sacrificed to it; for which reason, and not invidiously, I venture upon these remarks. If the practical English public ask the _cui bono_ of a botanist beyond the mere science, it may be answered that, setting aside the question of timber, the soil of these regions is capable of being made a mine of wealth when science shall have decided upon what it is best capable of producing.

Meanwhile M. Mann, after visiting the Bagroo river, near Sierra Leone and Barracoon Point, on the Niger, made, after twice failing, two ascents (in April and December, 1860) of Fernando Po Peak, where he was guided by a Spanish official, M. Pellon, the Special Delegate of Public Works. Their visit was the second ever made to the summit, the late Mr. Beecroft’s being the first. He subsequently ascended to the summits of Prince’s Island and San Thomé, and visited the Gaboon and other African rivers. He has been indefatigable in collecting and in preserving his collections, and has supplied one of the greatest desiderata in botanical geography.[11] The results have been to establish: ‘1. An intimate relationship with Abyssinia, of whose flora that of the Fernandian Peak is a member, and from which it is separated by 1800 miles of absolutely explored country; 2. A curious relationship with the East African Islands, which are still further off; 3. An almost total dissimilarity from the Cape flora.’[12] With the West African Islands again, contrary to expectation, there is no marked relationship whatever.

M. Mann had once more left Fernando Po on the 4th December, 1861, and, landing at Victoria, had begun his preparations without delay. There were the usual difficulties to be encountered; the bush people would give no guide, and the chiefs refused passage. Two days after his arrival he was ready to revisit the terminus of his last year’s march, which he knew by the name of Mapanya. A ‘Mokwiri,’[13] however, at Victoria, informed the traveller that the real Mapanya still remained unvisited, and offered to act as guide, requiring for himself and his five boys each five ‘big tings,’ here equivalent to five pounds. This exorbitant demand of thirty pounds for a mere preliminary lasted two days, when M. Mann definitely refused, and the fellow disappeared. At the next market Mr. Pinnock, a native missionary of the Baptist establishment, and his colleague, Mr. Johnson, enabled the botanist by great exertion to engage a guide. The man was a native of Mapanya, but living at a lower settlement: he was charged with presents for the chief of Kombi, a hostile village on the way; these naturally enough he took to his own ‘boss,’ and kept the stranger waiting three days for the return-message. Nor was this when it came particularly favourable. Every hour was precious, yet the traveller was told ‘Sit down for you’ three more days till ‘palaver’ had ‘set,’ _i.e._ been decided, after which guides and bearers might perhaps be forthcoming. Affairs, however, appeared to be opening up; and as my presence was required in the Camaroons River, M. Mann agreed to break ground as soon as possible, to botanize on the way, and to await my arrival before attempting the Peak. I must, however, do him the justice to say that he set out without delay and did his best of bests to be Number One; he failed, however, and failed signally, as the sequel will show.

The afternoon was devoted to inspecting the islands, which were accurately described by Messrs. Allen and Thompson.[14] Ndami, erroneously called Dameh, or Ambas, the outer or westernmost island, some two and a half miles distant from the northern mainland, possesses but one, and that a difficult, landing-place at the inner end. This rocky, tongue-shaped ridge, with a bold head of 150 feet fronting the sea, which foams and rages outside, whilst the Cove, or inner harbour, lies smooth as a mill-pond, is clear of trees, but shows on the lower slopes a little garden-ground about the huts of the inhabitants. It breeds goats and pigs in plenty; water, however, must be brought from the mainland when the people set out on fishing excursions. Separated from Ndami by a channel one mile and a half broad, stands its eastern neighbour Mondori, which Captain Allen calls Mondoleh, and others Mondoli,[15] a much more interesting place. About two miles distant from the northern shore, it is separated from the bold headland forming the eastern arm of the bay by a fair broad channel. The Victorians declare that it is accessible whilst the sauciest sea runs outside, and that, when the rest of the bay is a sheet of foam, vessels can ride snugly under the lee of its northern point; they assert that it has an excellent holding bottom of dark tough clay, and that it is superior in many points to the celebrated Clarence Cove, Fernando Po. The formation of the island, according to Mr. Roscher,[16] is amygdaloid basalt in the lower parts, and in the upper a more solid stone with shiny cleavage, evidently the result of different epochs of cooling; on the western side, where the greatest heat was, the older deposits are destroyed. Mondori rises about 200 feet from the sea, with the profile of a lumpy dome; it is steep on all sides, except at the south-east, where the landing is. Magnificent trees, hung with llianas and festooned with orchids, crown the summit and creep down the flanks. After repeated attempts, we failed to scale the bluff northern side, foiled by the impenetrable bush; we heard, however, the voices of the people above us, and we were told that it contains a few households, who add to the gifts of their nets the produce of the richest soil formed by decomposed basalt. Their huts are hidden from the sea and the bay, and a spring, it is said, supplies them with excellent water. Like Ndami, Mondori is claimed by one Nako, a Bimbia chief, as an inheritance from his father, ‘old Nako:’ there would be no difficulty in purchasing it. The place would be useful as a storehouse and a preliminary sanitarium; and should Government determine to send out convict-hulks or a coal-ship for this station, there is no better mooring-place than under its lee. A hundred negro workmen, gardeners, and lumberers, would easily clear and prepare it during the six months of the dry season.

The other islands alongshore are the Bubya, Bobbi, Abobbi, or Pirate Rocks, whose formation, like Point William at Fernando Po, reveals to us the original connection between the two mountains. Urged both by N.E. and S.W. winds, a violent sea must have beaten upon the low neck of land which in past times attached the bases of the sister peaks. The land was gradually dismembered, leaving fragments of islands, which are still being sliced away by successive inroads. Gradually the water began to roll deeper between them; the channel, however, is still shallow, and there is a subaqueous ridge extending from N.E. to S.W.[17] Presently the same surf, ever perforating and degrading, washed from Ndami the Bubya Rocks, and these in their turn, after being greatly curtailed in size, are nodding to their fall. The group numbers ten to fifteen, according to the state of the tide, which here rises eight[18] feet; the line, separated from the main by a sea-arm about one fathom deep, sets off the shore in a general north and south direction. The largest and the sole inhabited island is the second from the coast; it is a mass of ejected ashes, with volcanic dykes. There is but one landing-place; a sandy hole in a confusion of rocks, immediately below the highest ground. The only path is up the narrow edge of a basaltic vein, leading to a dwarf level, and here a natural bridge about three yards wide, with a sheer drop on either side, affords adit to the steepest acclivity, where the people fly when necessary. Though there is no ground for cultivation, and the grazing for beasts is scanty, the miserable huts swarm with children and dogs, pigs and goats. The people live mostly on fish, and when their rain-pools are exhausted they must seek supplies from the mainland.

Upon all the islands of Ambas Bay there may be 300 souls, who, perfect African Bedouins, are on bad terms with one other, and generally at war with their continental neighbours. They have, with but a solitary exception, received Englishmen well, and we have requited their kindness by attaching to them the odium of piracy. The ‘Lords of the Isles’ are, as their language proves, allied with the Bakwiri, the principal tribe upon the opposite coast; thus probably Fernando Po was also peopled, but at a much earlier epoch, from the mainland, by a tribe doubtless long extinct. The Camaroons tribes named in the chart are the Batongo to the south-west, the Bakwileh (for Bakwiri) south of the mountain, and the Bamboko to the south-east; all terms, except one, unknown to the people. Proceeding from the east, we find the Dualla, by English called the Camaroons people, the Isubu or Bimbia—the latter a name given by the older travellers—the Bakwiri or Bojesmans, and the Rumbi. The latter is also a European word. I could not discover what the tribe calls itself; possibly, like the Bube of Fernando Po, it has no (general) name. The people of Bubya are stout, independent fellows, with abrupt manners, the result of secluded and seafaring life; every visitor has remarked their robust and healthy aspect, which can be accounted for only by the superior salubrity of, and the freedom from malaria in, their island home.[19]

The history of European connection with this part of the coast is briefly told,—but first of foreign nomenclature. According to Mr. J. Grazilhier, who, as related by Barbot,[20] made a voyage to Old Calabar in A.D. 1699, the land was called by the Portuguese Alta Tierra de Ambozes—the highlands of Ambozes. The latter word, not being Lusitanian, may probably be the name of some extinct tribe: here and elsewhere the maritime African races rapidly disappear. It has been corrupted to Amboizes, Amboize, and Ambas, which latter appears in the Hydrographic Chart. The trivial English names of the mountains and the river to their east—Camaroons, further debased to Cameroons, and by the Jonesian writers to the yet more meaningless Kameruns—comes from the Portuguese Camaráõ, or the Spanish Camaron, a shrimp or prawn, of which there is a great variety from Lagos southwards.[21] I have retained the name, although to call this stupendous pile and the broad estuary beyond it ‘Shrimp Mountains,’ or ‘Prawn River,’ sounds somewhat absurd. Captain Allen, instructed by some Bimbia man, in his map gave to the highest peak the name of Mongo má Lobá, which means in Isubu ‘Mountain of Heaven,’ _i.e._ the starry expanse. The natives acknowledge this word: they usually, however, call the whole upper region Mongo mo Ndemi, literally the Mountain of Greatness, which is also Dr. Krapf’s translation of the words Kilima-njáro, applied to the Ethiopic Olympus in Eastern Africa. But to the lower eminence—the smaller hump of the camel’s back, which was formerly called ‘Camarones Pequeños,’ or ‘Little Camaroons,’ and ‘Gibraltar Rock,’ and which the Baptist missionaries have lately baptized ‘Mount Trestrail,’—Captain Allen has assigned the name of Mongo ma Etindeh, the ‘Mountain of Separation,’ that is to say, ‘the separate mountain,’ which the natives do not recognize. I should prefer to call the highland region and bay Ambozes, the two peaks Larger and Lesser Mongo, and the settlement Victoria: it would only, however, confuse those who have learned Camaroons and Ambas to unlearn the terms.

The adjoining country was formally discovered towards the close of the fifteenth century, by the noble Portuguese Fernaõ de Poo, who voyaged during the reign of D. Affonso V.; his name still survives in the Island of Fernando Po. About A.D. 1700 an active trade appears to have been carried on here and in the adjoining river. In the early part of the present century, to judge from Captain Adams, it seems to have fallen out of notice. In 1826 Captain W. F. Owen, R.N., the laborious surveyor of the two African coasts, explored the shore when homeward bound, and accurately laid down its geography. In 1833 ‘Kokliko,’ _i.e._ Colonel, now General, Sir Edward Nicolls, R.M.,[22] visited it in the ‘Quorra’ steamer, and the people of the islands, who had never been visited before except by kidnappers and buccaneers, fled. In 1837, Billeh, Chief of Bimbia, who also claimed Ambas Bay and its islands, conceded the best part of the country to Colonel Nicolls, on condition that he should be recognized as King William of Bimbia.[23] In 1842 the harbour was surveyed by Captain W. Allen and Commander Ellis, H.M.S. ‘Soudan.’ Two years afterwards, Lieut.-Commander Earle, H.M.’s brig ‘Rapid,’ made a treaty with King William and the Bimbian chiefs, abolishing slavery for a consideration of 1200 dollars in goods. In 1847, Mr. Merrick, a member of the Baptist Mission then settled at Bimbia and in the Camaroons River, made the first recorded trial to ascend the mountain:[24] according to the people he succeeded in emerging from the forest country, but presently water failed him; his escort suffered from cold, hunger, and thirst, and he was compelled to return. He died two years afterwards of a confirmed teetotalism: in these lands the habitual water-drinker is even more shortlived than the habitual drunkard.[25] In 1848 King William and his chiefs agreed with Mr. Beecroft to abolish the custom of human sacrifices at the funerals of great men; and in 1850 they bound themselves by a more stringent commercial treaty, settling their ‘comey,’ and affixing penalties to those who injure or stop trade. In 1855 H.M.’s Acting-Consul, Fernando Po, visited Ambas Bay in H.M.S. ‘Antelope,’ Lieut.-Commander Young, to settle an old ‘bob’ which had lasted a score of years. The people of the ‘Boobee Islands’ had defied King William and other Bimbian traders, they had openly seized his slaves, canoes, and goods, and they had refused to come on board the steamer. Fire was opened upon the wretched heap of huts; and when they were destroyed, the proprietors signed a paper ‘acknowledging King William of Bimbia rightful king and ruler of all the mainland and islands extending from Bimbia to Rumby;’ while the king and chiefs of Bimbia promised in their turn not to molest the ‘Boobees.’ In 1856 the late Mr. M. Laird strongly advocated in opposition to Fernando Po a British settlement at Ambas Bay, which had been greatly neglected on account of a supposed want of safe landing: he showed its superiority as a convict station to Ascension, and he also maintained, what had apparently been forgotten, viz., that a great part of the actual seaboard had been ceded to H.M.’s Government.[26]

Victoria was first settled in 1858. In May of that year the Spanish Government, formerly so incurious touching its West African possessions, suddenly bethought itself of making Fernando Po not only a strategic position, but a source of wealth. Hoping by means of _emancipados_ from Cuba to raise the Ilha Formosa to the rank of Madeira and Tenerife, Prince’s and San Thomé, they formally resumed possession after it had been virtually in English hands for nearly half a century. D. Carlos Chacon, Commander of H.C. Majesty’s squadron in the island and its dependencies, at once issued a proclamation forbidding any but Roman Catholic schools; and ordering ‘those who prefer any religion which is not the Catholic, to confine their worship within their own private houses or families, and limit it to the members thereof.’ This announcement fell like a shell amongst the black people of Clarence Town, alias Santa Isabel, who numbered some 800 souls, many of them creoles born in the colony. Having settled here in 1827, when Captain Owen was king, they considered themselves under British protection, and had since 1840 sat at the feet of Baptist ministers. On the 1st January, 1841, the ‘Golden Spring’ landed Mr. J. Clarke and Dr. G. K. Prince at Fernando Po. They returned home in the autumn of the next year; meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Sturgeon had arrived, and were followed in September, 1843, by Dr. and Mrs. Prince, Mr. and Mrs. Merrick, and Alexander Fuller. In December of the same year Mr. Clarke left Jamaica with a total of forty-one whites and negroes, amongst whom was Mr. Saker, the present head of the mission. In 1844 the Baptists attempted to settle at the mouth of the Bimbia River: they found the land beautiful, but deadly; and in 1850 they left it for Camaroons River, which has proved but little better. They then preferred Fernando Po. The Baptist converts, seeing the danger that threatened their pastors, memorialized H.M. of Spain, but obtained no redress.[27]

In August, 1858, Mr. Saker and his family left Fernando Po, where he had been allowed to reside only on sufferance, and emigrated to Ambas, which he called Victoria. He was accompanied and followed by sundry negro communicants, who have since, I believe, repented the step. Having obtained 1500_l._ damages—an exorbitant sum—from the Spanish Government, and apparently ignoring the antecedents of the country, he bought for 2000_l._—in kind, however, and in local valuation, which greatly reduced the sum—the most valuable part of the location from King William of Bimbia, Dick Merchant of Dikolo, and Prince Nako of Dualla. The grant of ‘prime cuts’ was bounded southward by the sea; north, by a line of compass-bearings somewhat indefinite; eastward, by a stream of water flowing into Man-of-War Bay—an adjoining inlet; and westward, a point nearly opposite Bubya Islands: a total coast length of twelve miles, which Mr. Consul Hutchinson makes eighty. It includes, as will be observed, Ambas Bay and Victoria Harbour. The first habitation, not to speak of the tents erected on landing, was a small iron-framed cottage, put up in September 1858, and still used by Mr. Saker and his family; it has wood, not metal, outside, and is habitable and tolerably healthy, no small contrast to the iron coffins, called Consular Residences, at Lagos and Fernando Po.

Then began a dispute which has lasted to the present day, and which could easily have been settled in six months. The jealous Fernandians naturally hated and feared the settlement on the mainland. The Spaniards held aloof, but the English shopkeepers and others locally interested were loud in their abuse. They declared the natives dangerous, and the prospect of the settlers to be starvation. Unable to deny the salubrity of a place to which many of them had often repaired for health, they represented that it possesses no safe anchorage, and cannot be entered without imminent risk during the rains. Commodore Wise, of H.M.S. ‘Vesuvius,’ was directed to visit Ambas Bay in 1859. Unhappily he was accompanied by an official who, according to the missionaries, had desired, but had failed, to become a partner in the land speculation. Captain Wise, who remained there only a few hours, is believed to have reported against the position; and Mr. Hutchinson (‘Ten Years’ Wanderings among the Ethiopians,’ chap. xviii.) gravely informed the public that ‘at one important part of the bay, described in the Rev. Mr. Saker’s chart as having four to six fathoms of water, it was found by Mr. Bowen, Master R.N., who had charge of the soundings, to have only from six to nine feet.’ The chart was copied from Captain Allen’s, and the statement caused considerable indignation; yet in 1862, Commodore Edmonstone, who had never even approached within sight of Ambas Bay, objected upon the mere theoretical grounds of its being a lee shore—as if all West Africa were not a ‘lee shore’—to its capabilities as a naval station.

On the other hand, Mr. Saker, and those who were with him, contended that the native tribes were few, scattered, and not dangerous; that the country can be made highly productive, and support fine cattle, which the island cannot; that building material everywhere abounds; that the north-east tornadoes, which do so much damage at Fernando Po, are here warded off by the mountain background; that mosquitoes and mangrove swamps are unknown; that the sea-breeze is pure and healthy in the lower levels, and that by ascending the high lands any temperature can be obtained; that the islands are fit for lighthouses and coal depôts, and the level strand for sheds and slips; that the eastern sea-arm is open even to the largest ships at all seasons, and that, however rough may be the sea outside, it is ever smooth under the lee of Mondori; that the position lies in the very track of the mail steamers, which must now diverge to Fernando Po; that the tenure of land would not be arbitrary, as must ever be the case in a military station; that Victoria offers complete religious toleration, and, finally, that the Camaroons generally would be the key of the valuable Oil Rivers, whose export trade to England is calculated at not less than a million and a half of pounds sterling per annum.

Virtually all this, and perhaps more, had been expressed by previous authorities. Captain Allen, R.N., after ample experience on the coast, found at Ambas Bay ‘palpable evidence of the superiority of the climate;’ where he enjoyed ‘a pure and prolonged sea-breeze or a cool land wind every night, ensuring a calm and refreshing sleep.’ He ends by declaring (vol. ii. chaps. viii. ix.) that ‘there are few places on the coast of Africa more suitable for a settlement’ than the lands at the base of Camaroons. Captain Close, R.N., does not hesitate to prefer Ambas Bay to Clarence Cove—a cruel dig—where the wind setting in prevents sailing vessels emerging from the gap without the aid of steam, and where at times the tornadoes are so violent that ships risk being stranded. Mr. Milbourne, master of the missionary schooner ‘Wanderer,’ has asserted that, ‘after giving a good deal of attention to this spot’ (the anchoring-ground under Mondori Island) ‘during the different seasons of the year, he found the water always smooth;’ moreover he was never detained in the bay, even when the mouth of the Camaroons River was inaccessible to small craft.

Here then we have Captains Allen and Close—of whom the former has repeatedly visited and surveyed the place—versus Commodores Wise and Edmonstone, who either saw it for a few hours, or who did not see it at all. A ‘plain man’ would hold that this decides the point _pro_ against _con_. I confess, however, that, all things considered, it would be necessary to run in and out of it some dozen times during the worst seasons, between September and November, before one could be certain of its capabilities as a naval station. Its fitness for a convict or settler establishment I hold proven: even were the surf at times heavy, it would be no greater objection than the bar to Lagos or the rollers to Ascension. Of the superior salubrity of the climate there is also ample practical evidence. Mr. Saker has for four years used his house on the seaboard as a sanitarium, when prostrated by the malaria-poison of the Camaroons River; and when the young negresses at Fernando Po wish to ‘make nyángá,’ as they call a peculiarly junketing picnic, they repair to Victoria.

I now proceed to consider the geography of this interesting region. The Camaroons Mountain is strictly in the African terra incognita, whose limits are now 5° N. lat. to 5° S. lat., with a depth into the heart of the Continent,[28] rising about the centre of the Bight of Biafra in the Gulf of Guinea, where the western coast—after that long easterly sweep which, hollowed out by wind and water, caused geographers, until some five centuries ago, to shear off the vast triangle whose base is the Equator, and whose apex is the Cape of Good Hope—bends almost at right angles towards the Austral Pole. It is not an insulated pinnacle, an isolated feature, as some have supposed: its prolongation to the N.E. and S.W. (from 33° N.E. to 33° S.W.) cannot be estimated at less than 50°.[29] In the former direction it seems to be connected by the Rumbi and the Kwa Mountains[30] with that long Fumbina line placed by Dr. Barth between the coast and Lake Chad.[31] Its position, with respect to the main ranges of Africa, has not been determined, and will require a special expedition. It may anastomoze with the meridional Sierra del Crystal, those West African ghauts which approach within a hundred miles of the Gaboon River’s mouth, and which from that point run parallel with the Ethiopic Ocean. On the other hand, it may connect with the latitudinal range known, for want of better name, as the ‘Kong Mountains,’ which, beginning N.E. of Sierra Leone, pass along the south of the Kwara (Quorra), and form Mount Patta to the west and the Bassa Hills to the east of the great stream, where, after collecting the waters of the Binue, it turns to the south. So far as is known, it does _not_ run parallel with the main axis of the interior mountain chains, ‘as though the convulsions which have elevated the inactive mountain ranges corresponded in direction with those which have produced the fissures in the earth’s crust, along which we find the active instances of volcanic action.’

The south-westerly prolongation of the Camaroons Mountains is even more remarkable. If the edge of a parallel ruler be placed on a Mercator’s map, nearly in the usual direction of the wind, viz. from about 33° N.E. to 33° S.W., it will align, besides Mount Alantika and the mountains of Fumbina, the Kwa, the Camaroons, Fernando Po, Prince’s Island, San Thomé, Annobom, and St. Helena, with an offset of 90° to Ascension. This observation, made by Captains Owen and Midgley, shows the strike of the elevating volcanic action. It may also be remarked that, omitting the Fumbina and other ranges, concerning which little is known, that the centre of disturbance was upon the coast, as is proved by the diminution of the more distant altitudes. Thus in charts the apex of the Camaroons is 13,760 feet, Fernando Po 10,190, Prince’s Island 3000, San Thomé 7500-8000, Annobom 2000, St. Helena (Diana’s Peak) 2693, and Ascension (Green Mountain) 2870.

In 1826 Captain Owen laid down the diameter of the true Camaroons buttress at nearly 20 miles from east to west, and the height at 13,000 feet. Captain Boteler, an officer under his command, gave more than 20 miles to the base, 13,250 feet to the greater, and 6000 feet to the lesser peak. The Hydrographic chart allows 13 geographical miles direct from Ambas Bay to the summit, to which it assigns an altitude of 13,760 feet. We reduced the 13 to a little less than 10 habitable miles, and the altitude to 13,130 feet. Allowing 6 miles for the more abrupt counterslope, and 10 miles of breadth from the eastern foot (not including the Bimbia Hills) to the summit, and a similar extent for the western side, which is rather understated, we obtain an area of 380 square miles—about one-third larger than Madeira and the Isle of Man. It is bounded on the north by the Rumbi Mountains, on the south by the Atlantic. The eastern limit is a creek flowing from N.E. to S.W. into the Bimbia River, or Camaraõ Pequeno, a stream probably discharged by the mountain;[32] and the western boundary is a branch of the Rio del Re, known to us as the Rumbi, and heading, it is believed, still further east than the Bimbia. Thus the Camaroons Mountain forms a parallelogram contained within 4° 20′[33] and 3° 57′ of N. lat., and 9° 1′ to 9° 25′ of E. long. We may roughly assume it to be within 4° of the Equator.

A sanitarium is sorely wanted for this portion of Africa. During the present year (1861) Lagos has become a British colony, with the usual amount of civil and military establishments. The only escape from the deadly malaria is to Tenerife or Ascension: the former distant, under the most favourable circumstances, three weeks; the latter ten days of steam by the aid of an accidental cruizer. On the other hand, the Camaroons are distant barely fifty-five hours. Its area is little less than the inhabited portion of the Neilgherry Hills in Western India. It has every range of climate—a tierra _caliente, temprada, fria_. The negro can flourish in the lower, the white man can sojourn in the upper part, where within 4° of the Line nightly frosts prevail throughout the year, and stores of ice and snow can be collected. The country is scantily inhabited, and only in parts, by a timid and feeble, though a wild and treacherous people. Land may be bought for a nominal sum; and the soil, as this narrative will show, is everywhere fitted for cultivation. With less than the Spaniards have expended upon Fernando Po, or than that which we have lavished on the splendid but useless Zambezi River, these mountains might in a few years be made a solid benefit to the coast of Western Intertropical Africa. I have seen the marvellous effects of removing naval invalids from their ships to a few hundred feet above sea-level at Fernando Po; here, by judicious management, even greater benefits might be expected. And for the future we must provide against another and even a greater evil of climate: the vomito, or yellow fever, which, of late years confined to the lands about the Gambia and Sierra Leone, is, whilst I write, advancing with giant steps towards the Equator. Its extreme elevation is known to be 2500 feet.

The age is agitating a movement in the right direction—one most important to a nation which, like Great Britain, requires expansion, and of which may be said, ‘_non progredi est regredi_.’ The mixed Anglo- Saxon race wants those cosmopolitan powers of acclimatization which scatter pure races, like the Chinese and Turanians, the Jews and the Gipsies, unscathed over the habitable world. The ‘people living between the Four Seas’ cannot, it is true, rear families in the tropics: the superior race may not descend into an inferior ethnic centre, though the reverse operation has many instances. Our melancholy task appears to be that of smoothing the way for a future and higher type of the initial genus and species—man. Emerson’s dictum may be extended to ourselves when he declares, ‘The German and Irish millions, like the negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.’ We must abandon the Utopian idea that we are destined to people the earth.[34]

But all the world over there are scattered isolated positions; hills rising like islands from the plains, mountain-masses, and rocky ridges, where Anglo-Saxon life and labour can—if incapable of propagation and perpetuation—at any rate be greatly prolonged. During the last half- century by deaths of British soldiers in India—not including casualties or the average loss of healthy stations—the nation, it is calculated by economists, has lost some ten millions of pounds sterling. Sir Ranald Martin, a strong advocate for the change, asserts that the third generation of unmixed Europeans is nowhere to be found in Bengal,[35] that the English soldier cannot be maintained in health and vigour upon the lowlands, and that the selection of suitable hill-stations has now become a state necessity. Health is strength, and strength is moral power, especially in the East. Sir Charles Metcalfe removed the garrison from the seaboard to the hills of Jamaica, and since its establishment at Newcastle and Maroon Town the mortality—excluding cases of disease contracted in the plains—was reduced to about one-third. In the Himalayas, 6000 feet above sea-level, on an average of five years (1850-1854) the mortality is hardly more than 3 per cent.—which is little higher than that of the civil population in France—against at least 10 per cent. in the low lands. At Poonah the English regiments have been healthier than those stationed in London barracks. When railroads shall have been established in India, no Minister will think of exhausting the soldier’s health and energies by confining him to the febrile zone; but keep him fresh and vigorous to throw upon the enemy wherever and whenever required. And our sons will marvel at the folly of their sires, who for the flimsiest of reasons, for a mere _vis inertiæ_—insist upon destroying Governors-General by binding them to the deadly Lower Bengal.

On the 11th December I set out in H.M.S. ‘Bloodhound’ to visit the Camaroons River, where the traders were calling lustily, as is their wont, upon Hercules. It is one of the ‘trust rivers,’ meaning thoroughly untrustworthy: the white seller, expecting a return of 100 to 150 per cent., gives on credit goods which the black purchaser takes, firmly resolving to delay payment as long as possible, and, if he can, not to pay at all. The Camaroons has at least three head-men, called ‘kings’ in the African sense of the word—monarchs much like all the kings, thirty and one, whom Joshua bin Nun smote with the edge of the sword—two hulks, three or four ships, and perhaps a dozen European agents, who, to collect some poor 1700 puncheons of palm-oil and to settle their endless grievances, require the presence of at least one ambassador and one commodore. The natives are not without unpleasant practices and habits. If a chief, for instance, ‘boys’ another, the ‘boy’ at once sets out in his war-canoe to show ‘he be man,’ slaughters some unoffending wretch belonging to the insulter’s tribe—an African succedaneum for the duello’s: the victim’s clansmen retaliate upon the ‘man’s,’ and so on _ad infinitum_. Like all Africans, having no confidence in, and expecting nothing like justice from, one another, they flock to the nearest European official, and beg him to act as arbitrator. If he consents, a regular ‘palaver’ must ‘come up,’ and words cannot express its weariness, its damnable iteration. Each speaker not only ventilates his eloquence even unto nausea, he also begins as near the days of Adam as he can, lest aught be wanting to proper comprehension; and for fear of the strong points being forgotten, he dins them a dozen times into the hearer’s ears. I persuaded, not without a little gentle violence, Bonny Bell, Priso Bell, and King Kwa or Acqua, the three kings—individuals clad in a total of red-yellow bandanas and tall black or sky-blue tiles—to abolish, under pain of removal from the river, such ‘facinorous practices,’ and, convinced that they would return to them at the first opportunity, I bade temporary adieu to the haunt of fever and iniquity, mentally exclaiming

Heu terra felici haud adeunda viro!

An advantage, however, had been secured by this visit to the Camaroons. Mr. Saker, long anxious to explore ‘the mountain,’ volunteered to accompany us, and his intimate knowledge of the Dualla dialect, and his long experience in the Bimbia country side, rendered him a valuable acquisition.

Of the ‘Bloodhound’ 13 out of 55 whites, besides the commander and the chief engineer, were prostrated by fever—such is too often the effect of a ‘Tour round the Rivers;’ and the medical officer protested against an intended visit to Old Calabar, the Kom Toro, and the Rio del Re, the last two of which I was anxious to open. The night of the 13th December saw us off the coal-shed Fernando Po, and four days sufficed to collect the outfit necessary for a month in the jungle.[36]