Un capitaine de quinze ans. English Page 20

  PART THE SECOND.

  WEST COAST OF CENTRAL AFRICA.]

  CHAPTER I.

  THE DARK CONTINENT.

  The "slave-trade" is an expression that ought never to have found itsway into any human language. After being long practised at a largeprofit by such European nations as had possessions beyond the seas,this abominable traffic has now for many years been ostensiblyforbidden; yet even in the enlightenment of this nineteenth century, itis still largely carried on, especially in Central Africa, inasmuch asthere are several states, professedly Christian, whose signatures havenever been affixed to the deed of abolition.

  Incredible as it should seem, this barter of human beings still exists,and for the due comprehension of the second part of Dick Sands' storyit must be borne in mind, that for the purpose of supplying certaincolonies with slaves, there continue to be prosecuted such barbarous"man-hunts" as threaten almost to lay waste an entire continent withblood, fire, and pillage.

  The nefarious traffic as far as regards negroes does not appear to havearisen until the fifteenth century. The following are said to be thecircumstances under which it had its origin. After being banished fromSpain, the Mussulmans crossed the straits of Gibraltar and took refugeupon the shores of Africa, but the Portuguese who then occupied thatportion of the coast persecuted the fugitives with the utmost severity,and having captured them in large numbers, sent them as prisoners intoPortugal. They were thus the first nucleus of any African slaves thatentered Western Europe since the commencement of the Christian era. Themajority, however, of these Mussulmans were members of wealthyfamilies, who were prepared to pay almost any amount of money for theirrelease; but no ransom was exorbitant enough to tempt the Portuguese tosurrender them; more precious than gold were the strong arms thatshould work the resources of their young and rising colonies. Thusbaulked in their purpose of effecting a direct ransom of their capturedrelatives, the Mussulman families next submitted a proposition forexchanging them for a larger number of African negroes, whom it wouldbe quite easy to procure. The Portuguese, to whom the proposal was inevery way advantageous, eagerly accepted the offer; and in this way theslave-trade was originated in Europe.

  By the end of the sixteenth century this odious traffic had becomepermanently established; in principle it contained nothing repugnant tothe semi-barbarous thought and customs then existing; all the greatstates recognized it as the most effectual means of colonizing theislands of the New World, especially as slaves of negro blood, wellacclimatized to tropical heat, were able to survive where white menmust have perished by thousands. The transport of slaves to theAmerican colonies was consequently regularly effected by vesselsspecially built for that purpose, and large depots for this branch ofcommerce were established at various points of the African coast. The"goods" cost comparatively little in production, and the profits wereenormous.

  Yet, after all, however indispensable it might be to complete thefoundation of the trans-atlantic colonies, there was nothing to justifythis shameful barter of human flesh and blood, and the voice ofphilanthropy began to be heard in protestation, calling upon allEuropean governments, in the name of mercy and common humanity, todecree the abolition of the trade at once.

  In 1751, the Quakers put themselves at the head of the abolitionistmovement in North America, that very land where, a hundred years later,the war of secession burst forth, in which the question of slavery borethe most conspicuous part. Several of the Northern States, Virginia,Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania prohibited the trade,liberating the slaves, in spite of the cost, who had been imported intotheir territories.

  The campaign, thus commenced, was not limited to a few provinces of theNew World; on this side of the Atlantic, too, the partisans of slaverywere subject to a vigourous attack. England and France led the van, andenergetically beat up recruits to serve the righteous cause. "Let uslose our colonies rather than sacrifice our principles," was themagnanimous watchword that resounded throughout Europe, andnotwithstanding the vast political and commercial interests involved inthe question, it did not go forth in vain. A living impulse had beencommunicated to the liberation-movement. In 1807, England formallyprohibited the slave-trade in her colonies; France following herexample in 1814. The two great nations then entered upon a treaty onthe subject, which was confirmed by Napoleon during the Hundred Days.

  Hitherto, however, the declaration was purely theoretical. Slave-shipscontinued to ply their illicit trade, discharging their living cargo atmany a colonial port. It was evident that more resolute and practicalmeasures must be taken to impress the enormity. Accordingly the UnitedStates in 1820, and Great Britain in 1824, declared the slave-trade tobe an act of piracy and its perpetrators to be punishable with death.France soon gave in her adherence to the new treaty, but the SouthernStates of America, and the Spanish and Portuguese, not having signedthe act of abolition, continued the importation of slaves at a greatprofit, and this in defiance of the recognized reciprocal right ofvisitation to verify the flags of suspected ships.

  But although the slave-trade by these measures was in a considerablemeasure reduced, it continued to exist; new slaves were not allowed,but the old ones did not recover their liberty. England was now thefirst to set a noble example. On the 14th of May, 1833, an Act ofParliament, by a munificent vote of millions of pounds, emancipated allthe negroes in the British Colonies, and in August, 1838, 670,000slaves were declared free men. Ten years later, in 1848, the FrenchRepublic liberated the slaves in her colonies to the number of 260,000,and in 1859 the war which broke out between the Federals andConfederates in the United States finished the work of emancipation byextending it to the whole of North America.

  Thus, three great powers have accomplished their task of humanity, andat the present time the slave-trade is carried on only for theadvantage of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, or to supply therequirements of the Turkish or Arab populations of the East. Brazil,although she has not emancipated her former slaves, does not receiveany new, and all negro children are pronounced free-born.

  In contrast, however, to all this, it is not to be concealed that, inthe interior of Africa, as the result of wars between chieftains wagedfor the sole object of making captives, entire tribes are often reducedto slavery, and are carried off in caravans in two opposite directions,some westwards to the Portuguese colony of Angola, others eastwards toMozambique. Of these miserable creatures, of whom a very smallproportion ever reach their destination, some are despatched to Cuba orMadagascar, others to the Arab or Turkish provinces of Asia, to Meccaor Muscat. The French and English cruisers have practically very littlepower to control the iniquitous proceedings, because the extent ofcoast to be watched is so large that a strict and adequate surveillancecannot be maintained. The extent of the odious export is veryconsiderable; no less than 24,000 slaves annually reach the coast, anumber that hardly represents a tenth part of those who are massacredor otherwise perish by a deplorable end. After the frightfulbutcheries, the fields lie devastated, the smouldering villages arevoid of inhabitants, the rivers reek with bleeding corpses, and wildbeasts take undisputed possession of the soil. Livingstone, uponreturning to a district, immediately after one of these ruthless raids,said that he could never have recognized it for the same that he hadvisited only a few months previously; and all other travellers, Grant,Speke, Burton, Cameron, Stanley, describe the wooded plateau of CentralAfrica as the principal theatre of the barbarous warfare between chiefand chief. In the region of the great lakes, throughout the vastdistrict which feeds the market of Zanzibar, in Bornu and Fezzan,further south on the banks of the Nyassa and Zambesi, further west inthe districts of the Upper Zaire, just traversed by the intrepidStanley, everywhere there is the recurrence of the same scenes of ruin,slaughter, and devastation. Ever and again the question seems to beforced upon the mind whether slavery is not to end in the entireannihilation of the negro race, so that, like the Australian tribes ofSouth Holland, it will become extinct. Who can doubt that the day mustdawn which wil
l herald the closing of the markets in the Spanish andPortuguese colonies, a day when civilized nations shall no longertolerate the perpetration of this barbarous wrong?

  It is hardly too much to say that another year ought to witness theemancipation of every slave in the possession of Christian states. Itseems only too likely that for years to come the Mussulman nations willcontinue to depopulate the continent of Africa; to them is due thechief emigration of the natives, who, torn from their provinces, aresent to the eastern coast in numbers that exceed 40,000 annually. Longbefore the Egyptian expedition the natives of Sennaar were sold to thenatives of Darfur and _vice versa_; and even Napoleon Buonapartepurchased a considerable number of negroes, whom he organized intoregiments after the fashion of the mamelukes. Altogether it may beaffirmed, that although four-fifths of the present century have passedaway, slave-traffic in Africa has been increased rather than diminished.

  The truth is that Islamism really nurtures the slave-trade. InMussulman provinces, the black slave has taken the place of the whiteslave of former times; dealers of the most questionable character beartheir part in the execrable business, bringing a supplementarypopulation to races which, unregenerated by their own labour, wouldotherwise diminish and ultimately disappear.

  As in the time of Buonaparte, these slaves often become soldiers; onthe Upper Niger, for instance, they still form half the army of certainchieftains, under circumstances in which their lot is hardly, if atall, inferior to that of free men. Elsewhere, where the slave is not asoldier, he counts merely as current coin; and in Bornu and even inEgypt, we are told by William Lejean, an eye-witness, that officers andother functionaries have received their pay in this form.

  Such, then, appears to be the present actual condition of theslave-trade; and it is stern justice that compels the additionalstatement that there are representatives of certain great Europeanpowers who still favour the unholy traffic with an indulgentconnivance, and whilst cruisers are watching the coasts of the Atlanticand of the Indian Ocean, kidnapping goes on regularly in the interior,caravans pass along under the very eyes of certain officials, andmassacres are perpetrated in which frequently ten negroes aresacrificed in the capture of a single slave.

  It was the knowledge, more or less complete, of all this, that wrungfrom Dick Sands his bitter and heart-rending cry:--

  "We are in Africa! in the very haunt of slave-drivers!"

  Too true it was that he found himself and his companions in a landfraught with such frightful peril. He could only tremble when hewondered on what part of the fatal continent the "Pilgrim" hadstranded. Evidently it was at some point of the west coast, and he hadevery reason to fear that it was on the shores of Angola, therendezvous for all the caravans that journey in that portion of Africa.

  His conjecture was correct; he really was in the very country that afew years later and with gigantic effort was to be traversed by Cameronin the south and Stanley in the north. Of the vast territory, with itsthree provinces, Congo, Angola, and Benguela, little was then knownexcept the coast. It extends from the Zaire on the north to the Nourseon the south, and its chief towns are the ports of Benguela and of St.Paul de Loanda, the capital of the colony, which is a dependency of thekingdom of Portugal. The interior of the country had been almostentirely unexplored. Very few were the travellers who had cared toventure far inland, for an unhealthy climate, a hot, damp soilconducive to fever, a permanent warfare between the native tribes, someof which are cannibals, and the ill-feeling of the slave-dealersagainst any stranger who might endeavour to discover the secrets oftheir infamous craft, all combine to render the region one of the mosthazardous in the whole of Equatorial Africa.

  It was in 1816 that Tuckey ascended the Congo as far as the YellalaFalls, a distance not exceeding 203 miles; but the journey was tooshort to give an accurate idea of the interior of the country, andmoreover cost the lives of nearly all the officers and scientific menconnected with the expedition.

  Thirty-seven years afterwards, Dr. Livingstone had advanced from theCape of Good Hope to the Upper Zambesi; thence, with a fearlessnesshitherto unrivalled, he crossed the Coango, an affluent of the Congo,and after having traversed the continent from the extreme south to theeast he reached St. Paul de Loanda on the 31st of May, 1854, the firstexplorer of the unknown portions of the great Portuguese colony.

  Eighteen years elapsed, and two other bold travellers crossed theentire continent from east to west, and after encountering unparalleleddifficulties, emerged, the one to the south, the other to the north ofAngola.

  The first of these was Verney Lovett Cameron, a lieutenant in theBritish navy. In 1872, when serious doubts were entertained as to thesafety of the expedition sent out under Stanley to the relief ofLivingstone in the great lake district, Lieutenant Cameron volunteeredto go out in search of the noble missionary explorer. His offer wasaccepted, and accompanied by Dr. Dillon, Lieutenant Cecil Murphy, andRobert Moffat, a nephew of Livingstone, he started from Zanzibar.Having passed through Ugogo, he met Livingstone's corpse, which wasbeing borne to the eastern coast by his faithful followers. Unshaken inhis resolve to make his way right across the continent, Cameron stillpushed onwards to the west. He passed through Unyanyembe and Uganda,and reached Kawele, where he secured all Livingstone's papers. Afterexploring Lake Tanganyika he crossed the mountains of Bambarre, andfinding himself unable to descend the course of the Lualaba, hetraversed the provinces devastated and depopulated by war and theslave-trade, Kilemba, Urua, the sources of the Lomami, Ulanda, andLovale, and having crossed the Coanza, he sighted the Atlantic andreached the port of St. Philip de Benguela, after a journey that hadoccupied three years and five months. Cameron's two companions, Dr.Dillon and Robert Moffat, both succumbed to the hardships of theexpedition.

  The intrepid Englishman was soon to be followed into the field by anAmerican, Mr. Henry Moreland Stanley. It is universally known how theundaunted correspondent of the _New York Herald_, having beendespatched in search of Livingstone, found the veteran missionary atUjiji, on the borders of Lake Tanganyika, on the 31st of October, 1871.But what he had undertaken in the course of humanity Stanley longed tocontinue in the interests of science, his prime object being to make athorough investigation of the Lualaba, of which, in his firstexpedition, he had only been able to get a partial and imperfectsurvey. Accordingly, whilst Cameron was still deep in the provinces ofCentral Africa, Stanley started from Bagamoyo in November, 1874.Twenty-one months later he quitted Ujiji, which had been decimated bysmall-pox, and in seventy-four days accomplished the passage of thelake and reached Nyangwe, a great slave-market previously visited bothby Livingstone and Cameron. He was also present at some of the horriblerazzias, perpetrated by the officers of the Sultan of Zanzibar in thedistricts of the Marunzu and Manyuema.

  In order to be in a position to descend the Lualaba to its very mouth,Stanley engaged at Nyangwe 140 porters and nineteen boats. Difficultiesarose from the very outset, and not only had he to contend with thecannibals of Ugusu, but, in order to avoid many unnavigable cataracts,he had to convey his boats many miles by land. Near the equator, justat the point where the Lualaba turns north-north-west, Stanley's littleconvoy was attacked by a fleet of boats, manned by several hundrednatives, whom, however, he succeeded in putting to flight. Nothingdaunted, the resolute American pushed on to lat. 20 deg. N. andascertained, beyond room for doubt, that the Lualaba was really theUpper Zaire or Congo, and that, by following its course, he should comedirectly to the sea.

  Beset with many perils was the way. Stanley was in almost dailycollision with the various tribes upon the river-banks; on the 3rd ofJune, 1877, he lost one of his companions, Frank Pocock, at the passageof the cataracts of Massassa, and on the 18th of July he was himselfcarried in his boat into the Mbelo Falls, and escaped by little shortof a miracle.

  On the 6th of August the daring adventurer arrived at the village of NiSanda, only four days from the sea; two days later he received a supplyof provisions that had been sent by two Emboma merchants to BanzaM'b
uko, the little coast-town where, after a journey of two years andnine months, fraught with every kind of hardship and privation, hecompleted his transit of the mighty continent. His toil told, at leasttemporarily, upon his years, but he had the grand satisfaction ofknowing that he had traced the whole course of the Lualaba, and hadascertained, beyond reach of question, that as the Nile is the greatartery of the north, and the Zambesi of the east, so Africa possessesin the west a third great river, which in a course of no less than 2900miles, under the names of the Lualaba, Zaire, and Congo, unites thelake district with the Atlantic Ocean.

  In 1873, however, the date at which the "Pilgrim" foundered upon thecoast, very little was known of the province of Angola, except that itwas the scene of the western slave-trade, of which the markets of Bihe,Cassanga, and Kazunde were the chief centres. This was the country inwhich Dick Sands now found himself, a hundred miles from shore, incharge of a lady exhausted with fatigue and anxiety, a half-dyingchild, and a band of negroes who would be a most tempting bait to theslave-driver.

  His last illusion was completely dispelled. He had no longer thefaintest hope that he was in America, that land where little was to bedreaded from either native, wild beast, or climate; he could no morecherish the fond impression that he might be in the pleasant regionbetween the Cordilleras and the coast, where villages are numerous andmissions afford hospitable shelter to every traveller. Far, far awaywere those provinces of Bolivia and Peru, to which (unless a criminalhand had interposed) the "Pilgrim" would certainly have sped her way.No: too truly this was the terrible province of Angola; and worse thanall, not the district near the coast, under the surveillance of thePortuguese authorities, but the interior of the country, traversed onlyby slave caravans, driven under the lash of the havildars.

  Limited, in one sense, was the knowledge that Dick Sands possessed ofthis land of horrors; but he had read the accounts that had been givenby the missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by thePortuguese traders who frequented the route from St. Paul de Loanda, bySan Salvador to the Zaire, as well as by Dr. Livingstone in his travelsin 1853, and consequently he knew enough to awaken immediate andcomplete despair in any spirit less indomitable than his own.

  Anyhow, his position was truly appalling.

  They were seated at the foot of an enormous banyan-tree.]