Africa, West -- Description and travel; Missions -- Africa
I said that from the time we came on board at Santa Cruz Ndong was
disposed to wander over the ship, and I had to watch him closely. Several
times he escaped from me. On one occasion I had been up with him until
about three o’clock in the morning. He was then asleep and I also lay
down and slept soundly for a little while. But during this time he had
wakened and was gone. The door was fastened at the first hook and I did
not suppose that he could pass through. He went on a tour of inspection
around the ship; but in a few minutes he was tired and wished to return.
He became confused and wandered into the saloon, at the other end of
the deck, and from the saloon into the cabin which he had occupied with
me when we went north. One of the army officers, a captain, an entire
stranger to me at the time, occupied the cabin. Imagine his surprise when
he was awakened in the dark by a strange hand upon his face. Supposing
it to be the hand of a robber, he seized it; but finding how very, very
small it was, he concluded that his life was not in immediate danger. He
remembered the little boy whom he had seen with me, and calling a steward
he sent him to me. I apologized to the gentleman next morning as best I
could. His generosity relieved my humiliation.
All the way to Teneriffe Ndong had been getting weaker each day. One
morning I took him on deck as usual, but in a little while he asked to be
carried back to bed. All that day and the next he lay quietly repeating
stories from the Gospel, one after another. He was again patient and
loving as before, and his mind was clearer. On Thursday morning, July
19th, about three o’clock he wakened, and I rose and sat beside him. He
was very weak and spoke with effort. But after a while he talked more,
and without difficulty. I had partly raised him in the bed and he lay on
the pillows with his arm around my neck. At last, with eyes dilated and
aglow with the beauty of another world, he said: “I see Mr. Marling; he
comes towards the door; and beyond him I see the City of God; and Jesus
is there. Do you not see, Mr. Milligan?”
“No, Ndong,” I said.
After a while he fell asleep; and some hours later he passed into the
deeper sleep in which there is “no more pain”; for he had gone to be with
Jesus, “which is far better.”
That same day at noon we buried him at sea, two hundred miles west of
Sierra Leone. Only those who have witnessed a burial at sea know how it
affects the mind with a nameless depression and spreads a gloom over
all on board. It is perhaps the awful vastness of the ocean grave that
imparts this sense of desolation. The sailors have many superstitions
regarding death on shipboard. For instance, they say that sharks
invariably follow the ship for twenty-four hours before a death takes
place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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