Travels in West Africa | Page 6

other pins, my
intolerable habit of getting into water, the abominations full of ants,
that I brought into their houses, or things emitting at unexpectedly short
notice vivid and awful stenches--they cannot but say that I was a
diligent pupil, who honestly tried to learn the lessons they taught me so
kindly, though some of those lessons were hard to a person who had
never previously been even in a tame bit of tropics, and whose life for
many years had been an entirely domestic one in a University town.
One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based
on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around
me, and found them either worthless or wanting. The greatest
recantation I had to make I made humbly before I had been three
months on the Coast in 1893. It was of my idea of the traders. What I
had expected to find them was a very different thing to what I did find
them; and of their kindness to me I can never sufficiently speak, for on
that voyage I was utterly out of touch with the governmental circles,
and utterly dependent on the traders, and the most useful lesson of all
the lessons I learnt on the West Coast in 1893 was that I could trust
them. 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