But on the lorry from Kailahun I still believed that I could plan my journey by time-table. I thought that we were going to Monrovia, the capital, straight from Bolahun and that we would be there within a fortnight; I would not have admitted the possibility that in four weeks we should be in a place I had never heard of, in the middle of the Republic, watching an old skinny woman who had made lightning in her village carry water back on her head to her fellow-prisoners in the horrible little gaol at Tapee-Ta.
For one thing I hadn’t the money for so extended a journey. I had cashed the last of my credit at Freetown and carried with me about twenty-five pounds in shillings, sixpences and threepenny-bits. In a steel moneybox with a padlock it made about half a man’s load. It was no good taking anything but silver into the Republic, and I was to find curious objections here and there to the silver money I had brought. One tribe wouldn’t look at money with Queen Victoria’s head on it; the news of her death had penetrated to the most unlikely places, to places where I and my cousin were the first white people to be seen in living memory, and the value of the coins, they believed, had died with her. When we approached the coast, among the Bassa tribe, we found that nobody would accept the ordinary English silver-stamped with a crown or acorns; they would only take the British West African coinage stamped with a palm tree. But this trouble was for the future; I was concerned only at the moment with time, with the need to get to Bolahun before dark. It was an unpractised traveller’s anxiety; it led to unnecessary strain and my carriers’ mistrust. Later I got used to not caring a damn, just to walking and staying put when I had walked far enough, at some village of which I didn’t know the name, to letting myself drift with Africa.
To the Frontier
At Biedu the chief was waiting in the village with the carriers and an interpreter. I knocked the price down from one and sixpence a man to one and threepence, conscious of the faint cynical amusement of the German, who never paid more than sixpence. The loads were spread out down the centre of the village and for the first time I could see the full extent of the luggage we had brought with us : the six boxes of food, the two beds and chairs and mosquito nets, three suitcases, a tent we were never to use, two boxes of miscellaneous things, a bath, a bundle of blankets, a folding table, a moneybox, a hammock; I couldn’t help being a little shamed by my servants, who each brought with them a small flat suitcase.
Later I tried to calculate how lightly a man could travel with safety for any length of time in the West African bush. I had spent more than fifty pounds on equipment and my invoices read like the list of goods supplied to an Everest expedition, but I do not think I could have cut down the loads by more than four with safety, for in West Africa there are strict limits to the lightness of travel, as the story of Dr. D a German botanist, suggests.
A week after I crossed the frontier Dr. D. died at Ganta in the Central Province, a town which I reached on February the fourteenth. His pathetic and dignified death, which was obviously deliberate, brought the world of Hitler, of Dachau and the concentration camps and Nazi self-righteousness even into this corner of Africa. Dr. D. had had forty yearslittle experience of West Africa. Before the war he was German Consul in Monrovia and an agent for the Woermann Line, but he was already known at Hamburg University as a botanist. After the war he was the first German to reopen business in the Republic, but he failed, he left debts behind him, and the new Hitler’s Germany to which he returned was not sympathetic to failure. He was seventy years old and a ruined man, and after forty years on the Coast he cannot have been at home among the swastika banners of Berlin, the Sunday processions with drums and bugles and bayonets under the Brandenburg Gate, the demonstrations at the Tempelhof. He was interested in tropical flowers, he wasn’t interested in who fired the Reichstag. Harvard University gave him a little money to return to the Republic and make a collection of botanical specimens in the interior. He found Hitler’s Germany well established in Monrovia; the two enthusiastic Nazis there disapproved of Dr. D. Hearing a rumour that he would be staying at the German Legation, they called on the Consul-General to protest, so that in those last days he was forced to find hospitality at an English store. There is no evidence of Dr. Dlittles intention, but it seems obvious that he had no wish to return to Europe and that he preferred to die in Africa. It is the only satisfactory explanation of his recklessness. For he went up from Monrovia through Bassa country to Sanoquelleh, ten days’ trek, without a hammock, without provisions, without even a bed or a mosquito net; he can hardly have travelled lighter when his body was brought down from Ganta for burial in the Lutheran Mission at Mόhlenburg. He slept on native beds, ate the native food, and died of dysentery.
There are limits, then, to travelling light. A District Commissioner in Sierra Leone seldom travels with less than twenty-five carriers for himself alone, and for much shorter treks than ours proved to be, while at one time, after we had lost two men from sickness, we were travelling with twenty-three. At Biedu, with a four-man hammock for my cousin, I had to take twenty-five carriers. A journey of about twenty miles therefore cost a little more than thirty shillings. Travel in Africa, if carriers have to be hired by the day, is expensive. This was the experience in the Republic of Sir Alfred Sharpe, whose route I followed at the start. He was forced to take carriers from village to village, sometimes paying two sets of carriers in twenty-four hours at the fixed rate of a shilling a day. At most villages there would be delay in finding new carriers; all the men might be working on the farms; and often it was impossible to travel more than eight miles in a day. I learned from his experience and waited at Bolahun a week until I had engaged carriers willing to come with us all the way and apart from the saving in wages I was able to average more than twelve miles a day over a period of four weeks.
The chief at Biedu gave me a chicken, I gave the chief a shilling. Souri, the cook, tied the chicken’s legs together, Amedoo went down the line of loads testing the weights, the German sat down on his hammock chair, and “Off!” I said. I felt like a subaltern facing my platoon for the first time. I couldn’t really believe that when I said “Off! ” the twenty-five carriers would be set in motion. I stood back and watched them with an odd feeling of pleasure, an absurd sense of pride, when like a long mechanical toy they were set in motion and wavered and straightened and strode out through the village on to a wide track which narrowed soon into a path through the elephant grass, into a tree-trunk over a stream, which wound into woods and clearings and woods again, and at last after two hours broadened out into a wide plateau which was the frontier; three or four huts, a few riflemen in scarlet fezzes with a gold device, the Liberian flag (a star and stripes), and a little man with a black moustache and a yellow skin and a worn topee who came out into the clearing and greeted me with a shifty nervous jubilant air as much as to say : we’ve got you here, “leave no screws unturned,”, plenty of tin for yours truly. He said, oh yes, he was expecting me; he had been warned.
One couldn’t help having, however unjustifiably, a sense of the dramatic; the way forward through the clearing was as broad as the primrose way, as open as a trap; the way back was narrow, hidden, difficult, to the English scene.