Hereditary taste for wandering—A first adventure—“Little girls you must not be tired”—How Carlo was captured by savages in West Africa—Life in Ballarat—Nothing for a woman to do but marry—Marriage—Plans for wandering twenty years hence—Life in Warrnambool—Widowhood—May as well travel now there is nothing left—London for an aspirant in literature—Stony streets and drizzling rain—Scanty purse—Visit to the home of a rich African trader—Small successes—At last, at last on board s.s. Gando bound for the Gambia.

“There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,

And a wealthy wife is she;

She breeds a breed o' rovin' men,

And casts them over sea.”

Sometimes when people ask me with wonder why I went to West Africa, why I wanted to go, I feel as if that wife must have grown old and feeble and will bear no more men to send across the sea. I hope not. I trust not. More than ninety years ago she sent my mother's father into the Honourable East India Co.'s service, and then, in later years with his ten children to colonise Van Diemen's Land. Nearly sixty years ago she sent my father, a slim young lad, out to the goldfields in Australia, and she breathed her spirit over the five boys and two girls who grew up in the new land. I cannot remember when any one of us would not have gone anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. It would not have been any good pointing out the dangers, because dangers at a distance are only an incentive. There is something in the thought of danger that must be overcome, that you yourself can help to overcome, that quickens the blood and gives an added zest to life.

I can remember as a small girl going with my sister to stay with an uncle who had a station, Mannerim, behind Geelong. The house had been built in the old days of slabs with a bark roof, very inflammable material. I loved the place then because it spoke of the strenuous old days of the Colony. I love the memory of it now for old times' sake, and because there happened the first really exciting incident in my life.

It was a January morning, the sky overcast with smoke and a furious hot wind blowing from the north. The men of the household looked out anxiously, but I sat and read a story-book. It was the tale of a boy named Carlo who was wrecked on the coast of West Africa—nice vague location; he climbed a cocoa-nut tree—I can see him now with a rope round his waist and his legs dangling in an impossible attitude—and he was taken by savages. His further adventures I do not know, because a man came riding in shouting that the calf paddock was on fire and everyone must turn out. Everyone did turn out except my aunt who stayed behind to prepare cool drinks, and those drinks my little sister and I, as being useless for beating out the flames, were sent to carry to the workers in jugs and “billies.”

“Now little girls,” said my aunt who was tenderness and kindness itself, “remember you are not to get tired.”

It was the first lesson I really remember in the stern realities of life. We had hailed the bushfire as something new and exciting; now we were to be taught that much excitement brings its strenuous hard labour. The fire did not reach the house, and the men and women got their drink, but it was two very weary, dirty, smoke-grimed and triumphant little girls who bathed and went to bed that night. I never finished the story of Carlo. Where he went to I can't imagine, but I can't think the savages ate him else his story would never have been written; and from that moment dated my deep interest in West Africa.

We grew up and the boys of the family went a-roving to other lands. One was a soldier, two were sailors, and the two youngest were going to be lawyers, whereby they might make money and go to the other ends of the world if they liked. When we were young we generally regarded money as a means of locomotion. We have hardly got over the habit yet. Only for us two girls was there no prospect. Our world was bounded by our father's lawns and the young men who came to see us and made up picnic parties to the wildest bush round Ballarat for our amusement. It was not bad. Even now I acknowledge to something of delight to be found in a box-seat of a four-in-hand, a glorious moonlight night, and four horses going at full speed; something delightful in scrambles over the ranges and a luncheon in the shade by a waterhole, with romantic stories for a seasoning, and the right man with a certain admiration in his eyes to listen. It was not bad, but it was not as good a life as the boys of the family were having, and it was giving me no chance of visiting the land Carlo had gone to that had been in my mind at intervals ever since the days of my childish bushfire.

There was really nothing for a woman but to marry, and accordingly we both married and I forgot in my entrance into that world, which is so old and yet always so new, my vague longings after savage lands.

I wonder sometimes would I have been contented to lead the ordinary woman's life, the life of the woman who looks after her husband and children. I think so, because it grew to be the life I ardently yearned for. The wander desire was just pushed a little into the back-ground and was to come off twenty years hence when we had made our fortune. And twenty years looked such a long long while then. It even looks a long time now, for it has not passed, and I seem to have lived a hundred years and many lives since the days in the little Victorian town of Warrnambool when my handsome young husband and I planned out our future life. But I was nearer to Carlo's land than I thought even then, and if I could have peeped into the future I would only have shrunk with unspeakable dread from the path I must walk, the path that was to lead me to the consummation of my childish hopes. In a very few years the home life I had entered into with such gladness was over, my husband was dead, and I was penniless, homeless, and alone. Of course I might have gone back to my father's house, my parents would have welcomed me, but can any woman go back and take a subordinate position when she has ruled? I think not; besides it would only have been putting off the evil day. When my father died, and in the course of nature he must die before me, there would be but a pittance, and I should have to start out once more handicapped with the added years. Again, and I think this thought was latent beneath all the misery and hopelessness that made me say I did not care what became of me, was I not free, free to wander where I pleased, to seek those adventures that had held such a glamour for me in my girlhood. True, I had not much money with which to seek them. When everything was settled up I found if I stayed quietly in Australia I had exactly thirty pounds a year to call my own. Thirty pounds a year, and I reckoned I could make perhaps fifty pounds by my pen. My mother pointed out to me that if I lived with my parents it would not be so bad. But it was not to be thought of for a moment. The chance had come, through seas of trouble, but still it had come, and I would go and see the great world for myself. I thought I had lived my life, that no sorrow or gladness could ever touch me keenly again; but I knew, it was in my blood, that I should like to see strange places and visit unknown lands. But on thirty pounds a year one can do nothing, so I took a hundred pounds out of my capital and came to London determined to make money by my pen in the heart of the world.

Oh, the hopes of the aspirant for literary fame, and oh, the dreariness and the weariness of life for a woman poor and unknown in London! I lodged in two rooms in a dull and stony street. I had no one to speak to from morning to night, and I wrote and wrote and wrote stories that all came back to me, and I am bound to say the editors who sent them back were quite right. They were poor stuff, but how could anyone do good work who was sick and miserable, cold and lonely, with all the life crushed out of her by the grey skies and the drizzling rain? I found London a terrible place in those days; I longed with all my heart for my own country, my own little home in Warrnambool where the sun shone always, the roses yellow and pink climbed over the wall, the white pittosporum blossoms filled the air with their fragrance, and the great trees stood up tall and straight against the dark-blue sky. I did not go back to my father, because my pride would not allow me to own myself a failure and because all the traditions of my family were against giving in. But I was very near it, very near it indeed.

Then after six months of hopelessness there came to see me from Liverpool a friend of one of my sailor brothers, and she, good Samaritan, suggested I should spend my Christmas with her.

I went. She and her daughters were rich people and the husband and father had been an African trader. So here it was again presented to me, the land to which I had resolved to go when I was a little child, and everything in the house spoke to me of it. In the garden under a cedar tree was the great figurehead of an old sailing ship; in the corridor upstairs was the model of a factory, trees, boats, people, houses all complete; in the rooms were pictures of the rivers and swamps and the hulks where trade was carried on. To their owners these possessions were familiar as household words that meant nothing; to me they reopened a new world of desire or rather an old desire in a new setting—the vague was taking concrete form. I determined quite definitely that I would go to West Africa. The thing that amazed me was that everybody with money in their pockets was not equally desirous of going there.

About this time, too, I discovered that it was simply hopeless for me to think of writing stories about English life. The regular, conventional life did not appeal to me; I could only write adventure stories, and the scene of adventure stories was best laid in savage lands. West Africa was not at all a bad place in which to set them. Its savagery called me. There and then I started to write stories about it. Looking back, I smile when I think of the difficulties that lay in my path. Even after I had carefully read every book of travel I could lay my hands on, I was still in deepest ignorance, because every traveller left so much undescribed and told nothing of the thousand and one little trifles that make ignorant eyes see the life that is so different from that in a civilised land. But if you will only look for a thing it is astonishing how you will find it often in the most unlikely places; if you set your heart on something it is astonishing how often you will get your heart's desire. I sought for information about West Africa and I found it, not easily; every story I wrote cost me a world of trouble and research and anxiety, and I fear me the friends I was beginning to make a world of trouble too. But they were kind and long-suffering; this man gave me a little information here, that one there, and I can laugh now when I think of the scenes that had to be written and rewritten before a hammock could be taken a couple of miles, before a man could sit down to his early-morning tea in the bush. It took years to do it, but at last it was done to some purpose; the book I had written with great effort caught on, and I had the money for the trip I had planned many years before when I was a small girl reading about those distant lands. I hesitated not a moment. The day I had sufficient money to make such a thing possible I went up to the City to see about a passage to West Africa.

And now a wonderful thing happened. Such a piece of good luck as I had not in my wildest dreams contemplated. Elder Dempster, instigated by the kind offices of Sir Charles Lucas, the permanent head of the Colonial Office, who knew how keen was my desire, offered me a ticket along the Coast, so that I actually had all the money I had earned to put into land travel, and Mr Laurie, my publisher, fired by my enthusiasm, commissioned a book about the wonderful old forts that I knew lay neglected and crumbling to decay all along the shores of the Gold Coast.

As I look back it seems as if surely the fairy godmother who had omitted to take my youth in charge was now showering me with good gifts, or maybe, most probably, the good gifts had been offered all along and I had never recognised them. We, some of us, drive in a gorgeous coach and never see anything but the pumpkin.

At least I was not making that mistake now. I was wild with delight and excitement when, on a cold November day, when London was wrapped in fog, I started from Euston for Liverpool. One of the brothers who I had envied in my youth, a post captain in the Navy now (how the years fly), happened to be in London and came down to the station to see me and my heaped impedimenta off.

He understood my delight in the realisation of my dream.

“Have you any directions for the disposal of your remains?” he asked chaffingly, as we groped our way through the London fog.

“Oh, that will all be settled,” said I, “long before you hear anything about it”; and we both laughed. We did not think, either of us, my adventure was going to end disastrously. It would have been against all the traditions of the family to think any such thing.

He told me how once he had gone into action with interest because he wanted to see what it would be like to be under fire, and whether he would be frightened. He didn't have much time to contemplate the situation, for presently he was so badly wounded that it took him six months to crawl off his bed, but it brought him a cross of honour from Italy. “And now,” says he, with a certain satisfaction, “I know.” So he sympathised. He felt that whatever happened I would have the satisfaction of knowing.

It is hardly necessary to describe to an English reader Liverpool on a cold, grey morning in November. There is the grey sky and the grey streets and the grey houses, and the well-to-do shivering in their wraps, and the poor shivering in their rags, all the colourless English world, that is not really colourless for those who know how to look at it, but which had driven me to sunnier lands; and there was the ship with her wet decks, her busy officers in comforters and sea-boots, her bare-footed sailors, and her gangways crowded with cargo, baggage, and numbers of bewildered passengers themselves.

And I think as we crowded into the smoking-room for warmth I was the only enthusiastic person among them. The majority of the passengers on board s.s. Gando actually didn't want to go to West Africa.

It seems strange, but so it was; the greater part of them, if they could have afforded to stay at home, would actually have stayed. I was inclined to be impatient with them. Now I forgive them. They know not what they do. It is a pity, but it can be remedied.

The Gando was not a mail boat. I had chosen her because she called at Dakar, and I thought I would like to go if possible to the first settlement on the Coast, and I wanted to see how the French did things. I may say here I never got to Dakar—still it is something to be looked forward to in the future, to be done when next I write a book that pays—for on board the Gando was Sir George Denton, the Governor of the Gambia, surely the nicest governor ever lucky colony had, and for such an important person the ship went a little out of her way and called first at Bathurst, port and capital of the Gambia colony.

Now, I had a letter of introduction to Sir George and I presented it, and he promptly asked me to come ashore with him. I had never thought of staying in the Gambia beyond the day or two the ship would take to discharge her cargo—“a potty little colony,” as I had heard it called, and it hardly seemed worth while to waste my time in a miniature Thames. How the Governor laughed when he found out my appalling ignorance, and how ashamed I was when I found it out!

“The Thames,” said he; “well, we only hold the mouth of the river about four hundred miles up, but the Gambia is at least a thousand miles in extent, and may be longer for all I know.”

I apologised to the Gambia.

“But could I see the river?”

“Why, of course; we'll send you up in the Mansikillah, the Government steamer”; and I accepted his invitation with alacrity and with gratitude.

Truly, my fairy godmother was more than waving her wand. I hadn't left English shores a week, and here was an invitation to go four hundred miles into the interior of the continent of my dreams.

We went first to the Canary Islands, the islands of the blest of the ancients, but the Canaries were as nothing to me; they have been civilised too long. They were only a stepping-stone to that other land, the land of romance, that I was nearing at last.

And now I have an apology to make, an apology which very few people will understand, but those few will, and to them it is a matter of such importance that I must make it. I went to see a savage land. I went to seek material for the only sort of story I can write, and to tell of the prowess of the men who had gone before and left their traces in great stone forts all along three hundred miles of coast. I found a savage land, in some parts a very wild land indeed, but I found what I had never expected, a land of immense possibilities, a land overflowing with wealth, a land of corn and wine and oil. I expected swamp and miasma, heat, fever, and mosquitoes. I found these truly, but I found, too, a lovely land, an entrancingly lovely land in places; I found gorgeous nights and divine mornings, and I found that the great interest of West Africa lay not in the opportunity it gave for vivid descriptions of heroes who fought and suffered and conquered, or fought and suffered and died, but in showing its immense value to the English crown in describing a land where every tropical product may be grown, a land with a teeming population and a generous soil, a land in fact that, properly managed, should supply raw material for half the workshops in England, a land that may be made to give some of its sunlight to keep alight the fires on English hearths in December, a land that as yet only the wiser heads amongst us realise the value of.

“A man comes to West Africa,” said a Swiss to me once, “because he can make in ten years as much as he could make in thirty in England.”

That is the land I found, and I apologise if I have ever written or thought of it in any other way.

“The White Man's Grave,” say many still. But even the all-powerful white man must have a grave in the end. Live wisely and discreetly and it is, I think with wise old Zachary Macauley who ruled Sierra Leone at the end of the eighteenth century, no more likely to be in West Africa than in any other place.

And the ship sailed on, and one morning early, before daylight, we heard the bell buoy that marks the mouth of the Gambia before lazy eyes can see there is a river, and knew that we had arrived at our destination. At last, at last I was on the very threshold of the land I had dreamed of years before.