So I trust that those at home in England will give
all honour to the men still working in West Africa,
or rotting in the weed-grown, snake-infested cemeteries
and the forest swamps—men whose battles
have been fought out on lonely beaches far away from
home and friends and often from another white man’s
help, sometimes with savages, but more often with
a more deadly foe, with none of the anodyne to death
and danger given by the companionship of hundreds
of fellow soldiers in a fight with a foe you can see,
but with a foe you can see only incarnate in the dreams
of your delirium, which runs as a poison in burning
veins and aching brain—the dread West Coast
fever. And may England never again dream of forfeiting,
or playing with, the conquests won for her by those
heroes of commerce, the West Coast traders; for of
them, as well as of such men as Sir Gerald Portal,
truly it may be said—of such is the Kingdom
of England.
APPENDIX. THE INVENTION OF THE CLOTH LOOM.
This story is taken down from an Eboe, but practically
the same story can be found among all the cloth-making
tribes in West Africa.
In the old times there was a man who was a great hunter;
but he had a bad wife, and when he made medicine to
put on his spear, she made medicine against his spear,
but he knew nothing of this thing and went out after
bush cow.
By and by he found a big bush cow, and threw his spear
at it, but the bush cow came on, and drove its horns
through his thigh, so the man crept home, and lay
in his house very sick, and the witch doctor found
out which of his wives had witched the spear, and they
killed her, and for many days the man could not go
out hunting. But he was a great hunter, and
his liver grew hot in him for the bush, so he dragged
himself to the bush, and lay there every day.
One day, as he lay, he saw a big spider making a
net on a bush and he watched him. By and by
he saw how the spider caught his game, and that the
spider was a great hunter, and the man said “If
I had hunted as this spider hunts, if I had made a
trap like that and put it in the bush and then gone
aside and let the game get into it and weary itself
to death quickly,—quicker and safer than
they do in pit-falls—that bush cow would
not have gored me.” And so after a time
he tried to make a net like the spider’s, out
of bush rope, and he did this thing and put his net
into the forest, and caught bush deer (gazelles) and
earthpig (pangolins) and porcupines, and he made more
nets, and every net he made was better, and he grew
well, and became a greater hunter than before.
One day he made a very fine net, and his wife said
“This is a cloth, it is better than our cloth
(bark cloth) because when the rain gets to it, it
does not shrivel. Make me a cloth like this
and then I will beat it with the mallet and wear it.”
And the man tried to do this thing, but he could not
get it a good shape and he said, “Yet the spider
