arose, but we gradually educated each other, and I had the
best of the affair ; for all I had got to teach them was that I
was only a beetle and fetish hunter, and so forth, while they
had to teach me a new world, and a very fascinating course of
study I found it. And whatever the Coast may have to say
against me— for my continual desire for hair-pins, and 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 hawe 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 wor
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. Günther, 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. Y e t 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 Ogowé and to see as much of Congo Français
as I have seen, and his efforts to take care of me were most
ably seconded by Mr. Fildes. The French officials in “ Congo
Français ” 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 o f
France that they need be ashamed of any one seeing ; but
I find it is customary for travellers to say the French officials