interested in the matter. I regard their value as being small
unless combined with a knowledge of the West Coast trade.
The liquor goes in at a few ports on the West Coast, and into
the hands of those tribes who act as middlemen between the
white trader and the interior trade-stuff-producing tribes
and is thereby diffused over an enormous extent of thickly
inhabited country. We English are directly in touch with
none o f the interior trade— save in the territory of the Royal
Niger Company, and the Delta tribes with whom we deal in
the Oil Rivers subsist on this trade between the interior and
the Coast, and they prefer to use spirits as a buying medium
because they get the highest percentage of profit from it, and
the lowest percentage o f loss by damage when dealing with
it. It does not get spoilt by damp, like tobacco and cloth
do ; indeed, in addition to the amount of moisture supplied by
their reeking climate, they superadd a large quantity of river
water to the spirit before it leaves their hands, while with the
other articles of trade it is one perpetual grind to keep them
free from moisture and mildew. In their coast towns there are
immense stores o f gin in cases, which they would as soon think
of drinking themselves as we, if we were butchers, would think
o f eating up the stock in the shop. A certain percentage of
spirit is consumed' in the Delta, and if spirits are wanted anywhere
they are wanted in the Niger Delta region ; and about
one-eighth part of that used here is used for fetish-worship,
poured out on the ground and mixed with other things to
hang in bottles, over fish-traps, and so on to make residences for
guardian spirits who are expected to come and take up their
abode in them. Spirits to the spirits, on the sweets to the
sweet principle is universal in West Africa ; and those photographs
you are often shown of dead chiefs graves with bottles
on them merely demonstrate that the deceased was taking
down with him a little liquor for his own use in the under
world— which he holds to be possessed of a chilly and damp
climate— and a little over to give a propitiatory peg to one o f
the ruling authorities there— or any old friend he may come
across in the Elysian fields. This is possibly a misguided
heathen thing of him to do, and it is generally held in
European circles that the under-world such an individual as he
will go to is neither damp, nor chilly. But granting this, no
one can contest but that the world he spends his life here
in is damp, and that the natives of the Niger Delta live in a
saturated forest swamp region that reeks with malaria. Their
damp mud-walled houses frequently flooded, they themselves
spend the greater part o f their time dabbling about in the
stinking mangrove swamps, and then, for five months in the
year, they are wrapped in the almost continuous torrential
downpour of the West African wet season, followed in the
Delta by the so-called “ dry ” season, with its thick morning
and evening mists, and the air rarely above dew-point. Then
their food is of poor quality and insufficient quantity, and in
districts near the coast noticeably deficient in meat of any
kind. I think the desire for spirits and tobacco, given these
conditions, is quite reasonable, and that when they are taken
in moderation, as they usually are, they are anything but deleterious.
The African himself has not a shadow of a doubt
on the point, and some form of alcohol he will have. When
he cannot get white man’s spirit—ruin makara, as he calls it in
Calabar— he takes black man’s spirit min effik. This is palm
wine, and although it has escaped the abuse heaped on rum
and gin, it is worse for the native than either of these, for he
-has to drink a disgusting quantity o f it, because from the
palm wine he does not get the stimulating effect quickly as
from gin or rum, and the enormous quantity consumed at one
sitting will distribute its effects over a week. You can always
tell whether a native has had a glass too much rum, or half
a gallon or so too much palm w in e ; the first he soon
recovers from, while the palm wine keeps him a disgusting
nuisance for t days, and the constitutional effects of it are
worse, for it produces a definite type o f renal disease
which, if it does not cut short the life of the sufferer in a
paroxysm, kills him gradually with dropsy. There is another
native drink which works a bitter woe on the African in the
form of intoxication combined with a brilliant bilious attack.
It is made from honey flavoured with the bark of a certain
tree, and as it is very popular I had better not spread it
further by giving the recipe. The imported gin keeps the
African off these abominations which he has to derange his
internal works with before he gets the stimulus that enables
him to resist this vile climate ; particularly will it keep him
from his worst intoxicant lhiamba (Cannabis saizva), a plant
which grows wild on the South-West Coast and on the West for
all I know, as well as the African or bowstring hemp (San-
seviera guiniensis). The plant that produces the lhiamba is
a nettle-like plant growing six to ten feet high, and the natives
collect the tops of the stems, with the seed on, in little bundles
and dry them. It is evidently the seeds which are regarded
by them as being the important part, although they do not
collect these separately ; but you hear great rows among them
when buying and .selling a little bundle, on the point of the