and Mr. John Holt. I have not added to this book
any information I have received since I wrote it,
as it does not seem to me fair to do so. My
only regret regarding it is that I have not dwelt
sufficiently on the charm of West Africa; it is so
difficult to explain such things; but I am sure there
are amongst my readers people who know by experience
the charm some countries exercise over men—countries
very different from each other and from West Africa.
The charm of West Africa is a painful one: it
gives you pleasure when you are out there, but when
you are back here it gives you pain by calling you.
It sends up before your eyes a vision of a wall of
dancing white, rainbow-gemmed surf playing on a shore
of yellow sand before an audience of stately coco
palms; or of a great mangrove-watered bronze river;
or of a vast aisle in some forest cathedral:
and you hear, nearer to you than the voices of the
people round, nearer than the roar of the city traffic,
the sound of the surf that is breaking on the shore
down there, and the sound of the wind talking on the
hard palm leaves and the thump of the natives’
tom-toms; or the cry of the parrots passing over
the mangrove swamps in the evening time; or the sweet,
long, mellow whistle of the plantain warblers calling
up the dawn; and everything that is round you grows
poor and thin in the face of the vision, and you want
to go back to the Coast that is calling you, saying,
as the African says to the departing soul of his dying
friend, “Come back, come back, this is your
home.”
M. H. Kingsley.
October, 1897.
[Note.—The following chapters of the
first edition are not included in this edition:
—Chap. ii., The Gold Coast; Chap. iv., Lagos
Bar; Chap. v., Voyage down Coast; Chap. vi., Libreville
and Glass; Chap. viii., Talagouga; Chap. xvi., Congo
Francais; Chap. xvii., The Log of the Lafayette; Chap.
xviii., From Corisco to Gaboon; Chap. xxviii., The
Islands in the Bay of Amboises; Appendix ii., Disease
in West Africa; Appendix iii., Dr. A. Gunther on Reptiles
and Fishes; Appendix iv., Orthoptera, Hymenoptera,
and Hemiptera.]
Relateth the various causes which impelled the author
to embark upon the voyage.
It was in 1893 that, for the first time in my life,
I found myself in possession of five or six months
which were not heavily forestalled, and feeling like
a boy with a new half-crown, I lay about in my mind,
as Mr. Bunyan would say, as to what to do with them.
“Go and learn your tropics,” said Science.
Where on earth am I to go? I wondered, for tropics
are tropics wherever found, so I got down an atlas
and saw that either South America or West Africa must
be my destination, for the Malayan region was too far
off and too expensive. Then I got Wallace’s
Geographical Distribution and after reading that master’s
article on the Ethiopian region I hardened my heart
