The Congo and Coasts of AfricaDavis, Richard Harding
History
The Congo and Coasts of Africa
Davis, Richard Harding
Africa -- Description and travel; Congo (Democratic Republic) -- Description and travel
The _Kanzlar_ could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the
_Adjutant_, which belongs to the same line and which was created for
these shallow waters, came to the _Kanzlar_, bringing Chinde with
her. She brought every white man in the port, and those who could
not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the _Adjutant_,
clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed
high above us. For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as
though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that
brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the
pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the _Adjutant_, in white
duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde
society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of
Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower
deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as
Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and
gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new
leather cases. From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and
from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in
fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian
coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound
and unwound long blue strips of cotton about their shoulders, or
ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading
required. Among these strange peoples were goats, as delicately
colored as a meerschaum pipe, and with the horns of our red deer,
strange white oxen with humps behind the shoulders, those that are
exhibited in cages at home as "sacred buffalo," but which here are
only patient beasts of burden, and gray monkeys, wildcats, snakes
and crocodiles in cages addressed to "Hagenbeck, Hamburg." The
freight was no less curious; assegais in bundles, horns stretching
for three feet from point to point, or rising straight, like
poignards; skins, ground-nuts, rubber, and heavy blocks of bees-wax
wrapped in coarse brown sacking, and which in time will burn before
the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Italy, Spain, and France.
People of the "Bromide" class who run across a friend from their own
city in Paris will say, "Well, to think of meeting _you_ here. How
small the world is after all!" If they wish a better proof of how
really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the
existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports twenty stores in
Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not
the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man
who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the
latitudes together and made the world the small department store it
is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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