VQ,VACÍE DOWN COASÍ C H A I 1,
rivers and in the winding' of the creeks, a thing difficult even
for the most experienced navigator to do during those thick
wool-like mists called smokes, which hang about the whole
I 8 | Bight from November till May (the dry season), sometimes
lasting all day, sometimes clearing off three hours after
sunrise.
The upper or north-westerly part of the swamp is round the
mouths of the Niger, and it successfully concealed this fact
from geographers down to 1830, when the series of heroic
journeys made by Mungo Park, Clapperton, and the two
Landers finally solved the problem— a problem that was as
gieat and which cost more men’s lives than even the discovery
of the sources of the Nile.
That this should have been so may seem very strange
to us who now have been told the answer to the riddle ; for
the upper waters of this great river were known of before
Christ and spoken of by Herodotus, Pliny and Ptolemy, and its
mouths navigated continuously along by the seaboard by
trading vessels since the fifteenth century, but they were not
recognised as belonging to the Niger. Some geographers
held that the Senegal or the Gambia was its outfall; others
that it was the Zaire (Congo); others that it did not come
out on the West Coast at all, but got mixed up with the Nile
in the middle of the continent, and so on. Yet when you
come to know the swamps this is not so strange. You find on
going up what looks like a big river— say Forcados, two and a
half miles wide at the entrance and a real bit of the Niger.
Before you are up it far great, broad, business-like-looking
river entrances open on either side, showing wide rivers,
mangrove-walled, but two-thirds of them are utter frauds
which will ground you within half an hour of your entering
them. Some few of them do communicate with other
main channels to the great upper river, and others are main
channels themselves; but most of them intercommunicate
with each other and lead nowhere in particular, and you
can’t even get there because of their shallowness. It is small
wonder that the earlier navigators did not get far up them in
sailing ships, and that the problem had to be solved by men
descending the main stream of the Niger before it commences
v RIVERS OF THE SWAMP
to what we in Devonshire should call “ squander itself about”
in all these channels. And in addition it must be remembered
that the natives with whom these trading vessels dealt, first
for slaves, afterwards for palm-oil, were not, and are not now,
members of the Lo family of savages. Far from i t : they do
not go in for “ gentle smiles,” but for murdering any unprotected
boat’s crew they happen to come across, not only for a
love of sport but to keep white traders from penetrating
to the trade-producing interior, and spoiling prices. And the
region is practically foodless. But I need not here go into
further particulars regarding the discovery o f the connection
between the Niger and its delta. It is just the usual bad ju-ju of
all big African rivers. I f you first find the mouth, as in the
case of the Nile, you have awful times finding the source I f
you find the upper waters, you have awful times in discovering
the mouth. I f you find a bit of its middle, like the Congo,
you have awful times in both directions, but fortunately the
Congo does play fair and does not go and split itself up and
dive into a mass of mangrove-swamps like the N ig e r ; so that
bit of river work at least was easier.
The rivers of the great mangrove-swamp from the Sombreiro
to the Rio del Rey are now known pretty surely not to be
branches of the Niger, but the upper regions o f this part o f
the Bight are much neglected by English explorers. I believe
the great swamp region of the Bight of Biafra is the greatest
in the world, and that in its immensity and gloom it has a
grandeur equal to that of the Himalayas. I am not saying a
beauty ; I own I see a great beauty in it sometimes, but it is
evidently not of a popular type, for I can never persuade inv
companions down in the Rivers to recognise i t ; still it produces
an emotion in the stoutest-hearted among them; yea, even
in those who have sailed the world round ; who have cruised
for years in the Southern seas, know their West Indies by
heart, have run regularly for years to Rio de Janeiro, and have
times and again been to where “ thy towers, they say, gleam
fair, Bombay, across the deep blue sea ”
Take any such a man, educated or not, and place him o h
Bonny or Forcados River in the wet season on a S u n d a y -
Bonny for choice. Forcados is good. YouU keep Forcados