It must have been a very forlorn little company of people who landed on a small island at the mouth of that unknown river in 1822. They called the island Providence Island, and there they were cooped up for some weeks, for the people on the shore, warlike savages who brooked no master, objected to the newcomers, and it was some little time before they could set foot on the mainland and found their principal town of Monrovia. That was nearly ninety years ago, but very far inland they have never been able to go, for though Liberia takes up quite a large space on the map it is only Liberia in name. The hinterland is held by fighting tribes who resent any interference with their vested rights, and make the fact particularly clear.

The outlines of the history of Liberia I had known vaguely for many a long day even to the name of Monrovia their capital, so called after President Munro, and it seemed to give point to the story to sit on the deck of the ship that swung at her anchors just beyond the surf of the river mouth. At least they had chosen a very beautiful place. Blue sky, blue sea, snow-white surf breaking on the bar, and a hillside clothed in dense greenery with palms cutting the sky line and the roofs of houses peeping out from among the verdure, that is what I saw, and the captain was emphatic I had seen the best of it. I did not doubt his word then, and having been ashore I am bound to confess he was right.

But the difficulty was to get ashore. I had a letter to the British Consul, but I had not sampled the kindliness of British Consuls as I had that of the Governors, and I did not know exactly what he would say. “I wonder if there is an hotel,” I said doubtfully to the captain, and he sniffed.

“You couldn't stay in a negro hotel.”

I sent off my letter to the Consul and waited, and a little cloud came up out of the sea and spread over all the sky, and it rained, and it rained, and it rained, and it rained. The sky was dark and forbidding, the sea was leaden-coloured, the waves just tipped with angry, white foam, and the green hills were blotted out, the decks were awash, the awnings were sopping and wept coaly tears, and the captain said as if that settled it, “There, you can't possibly go ashore.” But I was by no means sure. Still there was no letter from His Majesty's Consul. Morning passed on to afternoon, and afternoon waned towards evening and still there was no letter. A ship on a pouring wet day is just about as uncomfortable a place as one can be in, but still I was inclined to accept the captain's opinion that Monrovia without someone to act as guide, philosopher, and friend would be a worse place.

No letter, and the captain came along.

“I must get away before dark.” He spoke as if that settled it, and he was right, but not the way he expected.

I felt I simply could not go without seeing this place, and I decided. “Then I'll go ashore.”

“You can't possibly.”

“Oh yes, I can. They won't eat me.”

I don't know though that I was quite comfortable as I was dropped over the side in a mammy chair into a surf boat that was half-full of water. The rain had stopped at last but everything in that boat was wet, and my gear made a splash as it was dropped down.

My soldier brother had lent me his camp-kit for the expedition.

“Can't possibly hurt it,” said he good-naturedly. “It's been through two campaigns. If you spoil it, it shall be my contribution; but you won't.”

I accepted, but I thought as I sat on the bedding-roll at the bottom of that very wet boat, with my head not coming above the gunwale, that he did not know Africa. I hoped I should not have to sleep on that bed that night, because it was borne in on me it would be more than damp.

Luckily I didn't. We crossed the bar, and the ragged, half-naked Kroo boys, than whom there are surely no better boatmen in the world, begged a dash, “because we no splash you,” as if a bucket or two of salt water would have made much difference, and I gave it and was so absorbed in the wonder as to what was to become of me that I gave hardly any heed to the shore that was approaching. When I did it was to notice that all the beauty I had seen from the deck was vanishing. Man's handiwork was tumble-down, dirty, dilapidated, unfinished. I stepped from the boat to a narrow causeway of stone; it is difficult to get out of a boat five feet deep with grace, more especially when your skirts are sopping, and I stepped from the causeway, it was not above a foot wide, into yellow mud, and saw I was surrounded by dilapidated buildings such as one might see in any poor, penniless little port. There were negroes in all stages of rags round me, and then out from amongst them stepped a white man, a neat and spick-and-span white man with soldier written all over him, the soldier of the new type, learned, thoughtful, well-read.

“Mrs Gaunt?”

I said “Yes” with a little gasp, because his immaculate spruceness made me feel I was too much in keeping with the buildings and the people around us.

“Did you get my note? I am sorry I only got yours a couple of hours ago.”

Oh, I understood by now that in Africa it is impossible for a note to reach its destination quickly, and I said so, and he went on to arrange for my accommodation.

“If you will stay at the Consulate I will be delighted, but it is a mile and a half from the town, and I have no wife; or there is a boarding-house in the town, not too uncomfortable I am told.”

There could be but one answer to that. Of course I accepted his invitation; there are but few conventions and no Mrs Grundy in out-of-the-way spots, thank heaven, and in the growing darkness we set off for the Consulate. It was broken to me regretfully that I would have to walk; there is no other means of progression in the negro republic.

Such a walk as it was. Never have I met such a road. It was steep, and it was rough, and it was stony as a mountain torrent; now after the rain it was wet and slippery and the branches of the overhanging trees showered us with water as we passed. It was lonely as a forest path in Ashanti, and the jungle was thick on either hand, the night birds cried, the birds that loved the sun made sleepy noises, the ceaseless insects roused to activity by the rain made the darkness shrill with their clamour, and there were mysterious rustlings as small animals forced their way through the bush or fled before us. My host offered me his stick to pull me over the steepest rocks, and also supplied the interesting information that round the Consulate the deer came down to lick the salt from the rocks, and the panthers, tigers they called them there, came down and killed the deer. I made a mental note not to walk in that path by night; indeed I made a note not to walk in it ever again, as drenched and dripping with perspiration we emerged into a clearing and saw looming up before us a tropical bungalow and beyond the sea. It is an exquisite situation but is desperately lonely.

My gear came on men's heads and the Consul's note was delivered to me in the bush. Neither he nor I understood why it had come by such a roundabout path. One of his servants also met us half-way with a lantern, and since I had heard by then about the “tigers” I confess to thinking it was a wise precaution.

The Consulate is a fine two-storied building with wide verandahs and a large hall where we generally sat, and that hall was very inadequately lighted by some excellent lamps. The Consul didn't understand them and the negro servants didn't understand them, and darkness was just visible and I determined as soon as I knew my host well enough to ask him to let me have a turn at his lamps. Such is the power of a little knowledge; when I left the Consulate it was lighted as it should be, but that first night we spent in a dim, religious light, and I felt I was going to enjoy myself hugely, for here at last was something new. The Gambia and Sierra Leone had been too much regulation Tropics; all that I had seen and done I had at least read of before, but this was something quite different. This had all the glamour of the unknown and the unexpected. I am bound to say that His Majesty's Consul did not look at things with the same eyes. He didn't like Liberia, and he said frankly that things might be unexpected in a measure but he always knew they would be unpleasant. But I went to bed that night with the feeling I was really entering into the land of romance.

Next morning I told my host I would go and see the town.

“But I shan't go by the short cut,” I added emphatically.

“What short cut?”

“The way we came last night.”

“That's not a short cut,” said he, and he smiled pitifully at my ignorance of what was before me. “That's the main road.”

And so it was. Afterwards I tried to photograph it, but in addition to the difficulty of getting an accurate picture of a steep slope, I had the misfortune to shake the camera, and so my most remarkable picture was spoiled. I give a picture of the road, but I always felt when I came to that part the worst was left behind. And yet on this road is the Liberian College where the youth of Liberia, male and female, are educated. It is a big building built of brick and corrugated iron, in a style that seems wholly unsuited to the Liberian climate, though viewed from a distance it looks imposing in its setting of greenery. They teach the children algebra and euclid, or profess to do so—evil-tongued rumour has it that the majority of the Liberian women can neither read nor write—but to attain that, to them a useless edge, they have to scramble over without exception the very worst road I have ever met.

But the road only matches the rest of the place. Monrovia is not only an ill-kept town, it is an outrageously ill-kept town.

Many towns have I seen in the world, many, many towns along this west coast of Africa, so I am in a position to compare, and never have I seen such hopelessly miserable places as Monrovia and the other smaller Liberian towns along the Coast. The streets look pretty enough in a photograph; they are pretty enough in reality because of the kindly hand of Nature and the tropical climate which makes vegetation grow up everywhere. There is no wheeled traffic, no possibility of getting about except on your own feet, and in consequence the roadways are generally knee-deep in weeds, with just a track meandering through them here and there, and between the roadway and the side walk is a rough gutter, or at least waterway, about two feet deep, and of uncertain width, usually hidden by the veiling weeds. Occasionally they have little gimcrack bridges apparently built of gin cases across these chasms, but, as a rule, if I could not jump as the wandering goats did, I had to make my way round, even though it involved a detour of at least a quarter of a mile.

And the houses in the streets were unlike the houses to be seen anywhere else on the West Coast, and, to my mind at least, are quite unsuited to a tropical climate. They are built of wood, brick, or, and this is the most common, of corrugated iron, are three or four stories high, steep and narrow, with high-pitched roofs, and narrow balconies, and many windows which are made with sashes after the fashion of more temperate climes. The Executive Mansion, as they call the official residence of the President, is perhaps as good a specimen as any and is in as good repair, though even it is woefully shabby, and the day I called there, for of course I paid my respects, clothes were drying on the weeds and grass of the roadway just in front of the main entrance. Two doors farther down was a tall, rather pretentious redbrick house which must have cost money to build, but the windows were broken and boarded up, and one end of the balcony was just a ragged fringe of torn and rotting wood. So desolate was the place I thought it must be deserted, but no. On looking up I saw that on the other end of the balcony were contentedly lolling a couple of half-dressed women and a man, naked to the waist, who were watching with curiosity the white woman strolling down the street.

A great deal of the Liberian's life must be spent on his balcony, for the houses must be very stuffy in such a climate, and they are by no means furnished suitably; of course it is entirely a matter of taste, but for West Africa I infinitely preferred the sanded, earthen floor of my friend the Jolloff pilot's wife to the blue Brussels-carpet on the drawing-room floor of the wife of the President of the Liberian republic. But, as I have said, this is a matter of taste, and I may be wrong. I know many houses in London, the furniture of which appears to me anything but suitable.

It was quaint to me, me an Australian with strong feelings on the question of colour, to be entertained by the President's wife, a kindly black lady in a purple dress and with a strong American accent. She had never been out of Africa, she told me, and she had great faith in the future of Liberia. The President had been to England twice. And the President's sad eyes seemed to say, though he hinted no such thing, that he did not share his wife's optimism.

“We have lovely little homes up the river,” she said as she shifted the array of bibles and hymn-books that covered the centre-table in the drawingroom to make room for the tray on which was ginger-beer for my refreshment, “and if you will go up, we will make you very welcome.”

She would not let me take her photograph as I desired to do; possibly she had met the amateur photographer before and distrusted the species. I could not convince her I could produce a nice picture.

I never saw those “lovely little homes” either. They certainly were not to be found in my meaning of the words in Monrovia or any of the Coast towns, and up country I did not go; there was no way of doing so, save on my own feet, and I felt then I could not walk in such a hot climate. There may be such homes, I do not know, for between this good, kindly woman and me was the great unbridgeable gulf fixed, and our modes of thought were not the same. In judging things Liberian I try to remember that. Every day it was brought home to me.

The civilised black man, for instance, is often a great stickler for propriety, and I have known one who felt himself obliged to board up his front verandah because the white man who lived opposite was wont to stroll on his balcony in the early morning clad only in his pyjamas, and yet often passing along the street and looking up I saw men and women in the scantiest of attire lounging on their balconies doing nothing, unless they were thinking, which is doubtful.

Dress or want of dress, I find, strikes one curiously. I have times without number seen a black man working in a loin cloth or bathing as Nature made him, and not been conscious of anything wrong. He seemed fitly and suitably clad; he lacked nothing. But looking on those men in the balconies in only a pair of trousers, or women in a skirt pure and simple, among surroundings that to a certain extent spoke of civilisation, there was a wrong note struck. They were not so much barbaric as indecent. It was as if a corner of the veil of respectability had been lifted, the thin veneer of civilisation torn off, and you saw if you dared to look the possibilities that lie behind. I believed all the horrible stories of Vaudooism of America and the West Indies when I saw the naked chest and shoulders of a black man leaning over a balcony in Monrovia, and yet I have been only moved to friendliness when the fetish man of an Ashanti village, with greasy curls flying, with all his weird ornaments jingling, tom-toms beating, and excited people shouting, came dancing towards me and pranced round me with pointing fingers that I hope and believe meant a blessing. Can anyone tell me why this was? Was it because the fetish man was giving of his very best, while the half-civilised man was sinking back into barbarism and looking at the white woman gave her thoughts she would deeply have resented? Was it just an example of the thought-reading we are subconsciously doing every day and all day long without exactly realising it ourselves?

The people of Monrovia, there are over 4000 of them, seem always lounging and idling, and the place looks as if it were no one's business to knock in a nail or replace a board. It is falling into decay. It is not deserted, for the people are there, and presumably they live. They exist waiting for their houses to tumble about their ears. There is a market-place down in Waterside, the poorest, most miserable market-place on all the African coast. The road here, just close to the landing-place, is not made, but just trodden hard by the passing of many feet. Here and there the native rocks crop up, and no effort has been made to smooth them down. Above all, the stench is sickening, for the Coast negro, without the kindly, sometimes the stern guidance of the white man, is often intolerably dirty, and if my eyes did not recognise it, my nose would. In all the town, city they call it, there is not one garden or attempt at a garden. The houses are set wide enough apart; any fences that have been put up are as a rule broken-down, invariably in need of repair, and in between those houses is much wild growth. The scarlet hibiscus covers a broken fence; an oleander grows bushy and covered with pink roselike flowers; stately cocoa-nut palms, shapely mangoes are to be seen, and all over the streets and roadway in the month of January, I was there, as if it would veil man's neglect as far as possible, grew a creeping convolvulus with masses of pink cup-shaped flowers—in the morning hopeful and fresh and full of dew, in the evening wilted and shut up tightly as if they had given up the effort in hopeless despair. Never have I seen such a dreary, neglected town. It would be pitiful anywhere in the world. It is ten times more so here, where one feels that it marks the failure of a race, that it almost justifies the infamous traffic of our forefathers. It was all shoddy from the very beginning. It is now shoddy come to its inevitable end.

For all the great mark on the map, as I have said, the settlements at Monrovia do not extend more than thirty miles up the river; elsewhere the civilised negroes barely hold the sea-board. They are eternally at war with the tribesmen behind, and here in Monrovia I met half a dozen of the prisoners, dressed in rags, chained two and two with iron collars round their necks, and their guard, a blatant, self-satisfied person, was just about as ragged a scarecrow as they were. Not that the victory is by any means always to the Liberians, for a trader, an Englishman, who had been seeking fresh openings in the hinterland where no Liberian would dare to go, told me that though the tribes are not as a rule cannibals, they do make a practice of eating their best-hated enemies, and he had come across the hands and feet of not a few of the Liberian Mendi soldiery in pickle for future use.

To keep these tribesmen in check, the Liberian, who is essentially a man of peace—a slave—has been obliged to raise an army from the Mendis who inhabit the British protectorate to the west, and so he has laid upon himself a great burden. For, unfortunately, there is not always money in the treasury to satisfy this army of mercenaries when they get tired of taking out their pay in trade gin or tobacco. Poor Liberians, threatened with a double danger. If they have no soldiers the tribesmen within their borders eat them up, and if they have soldiers, war they must have, to provide an outlet for energies that otherwise might be misdirected.

I left my kind host with many regrets and Monrovia without any, and I went on board the Chama which was to call at Grand Bassa and Cape Palmas, and if I did not intend to view them entirely from the ship's deck, at least I felt after my visit to Monrovia it would hardly be necessary for me to stay in either of these towns.

They bear a strong family resemblance to the capital, only they are “more so.” The tribes see to it, I believe, that there is no communication with the capital except by sea, and the little communities with their pretensions to civilisation are far less ininteresting than the people of an Ashanti village who have seldom or never seen a white man.

I landed at Lower Buchanan, Grand Bassa, early one morning. The beach simply reeked of human occupancy. They do not trouble about sanitation in Liberia, and the town itself looked as if the houses had been set down promiscuously in the primeval bush. Perhaps there were more signs of wealth than in Monrovia, for I did see three cows and at least half a dozen hairy, razor-backed pigs on the track that was by courtesy the principal street, and it must require something to support all the churches.

I suppose it is the emotional character of the negro that makes him take so largely to religion, or rather, I think I may say, the observances of religion. The question of the missionaries is a vexed one, and on board the Chama was a missionary who made me think. She was a pretty young girl who had left home and father and mother and sisters and brothers and lover—ah, the lover was evidently hard where all had been hard—to minister to the spiritual needs of the people who dwelt behind Cape Palmas. She was sweetly ignorant of the world, of everything that did not apply to the little home in Canada that she had left with such reluctance, and was evidently immensely surprised to find the captain and officers of the ship kindly, honest gentlemen who treated her as tenderly and deferentially as they might have treated one of their own young sisters.

“I thought all sailors were bad men,” she said wonderingly. “I have always been led to believe they were bad.”

Now, what could such a nice, ignorant little girl as that teach the negro? And yet she had curiously hard ideas on some subjects. She talked about the missionary and his wife to whom she was going for five long years and to whom she was bringing out clothes for their baby.

“If it is alive,” she added naively.

“Oh, I hope it will live,” said I, the heathen who doubted the use of missionaries and all their works.

“Well, I don't know”—and the cynicism sat curiously on the sweet, young face—“poor little kiddie, perhaps it is better dead. What sort of a life could it have out there, and what sort of an upbringing? Its mother has other work to do.”

And I tried to show her that one white child was worth a thousand problematical souls of negroes, and I tried in vain.

But if ever I saw the wrong side of Christianity I saw it here in Liberia. Monrovia had many churches, all more or less unfinished, all more or less in decay, and here in Lower Buchanan three corrugated-iron churches within a stone's throw of one another constituted one of the chief features of the town. It was early on a Tuesday morning, the best time for work in a tropical climate, if work is going to be done at all. On the beach the Kroo boys were bringing from surf boats the piassava, the fibre that grows in the swamps and constitutes a large part of the Liberian export, but in Lower Buchanan itself the greater part of the inhabitants that I saw were in church. I entered that church.

Such a tatterdemalion crew! God forbid that I should scoff at any man's faith, but here cleanliness is practically divorced from godliness, and I can honestly say that never in my life have I seen dirtier bundles of rags than that congregation. A woman in a costume a scarecrow would have despised, her head adorned with a baby's hat, the dirty white ribbons fluttering down behind, was praying aloud with much unction, shouting that she was a miserable sinner, and calling upon the Lord to forgive her. The negro loves the sound of his own voice, and again I must claim that I do not scorn any man's sincere faith, but that negro lady was thoroughly enjoying herself, absolutely sure of her own importance. The ragged scarecrows who listened punctuated the prayer with groans of delight, and the only decent one amongst them was a small girl, whose nakedness was hidden by a simple blue-and-white cloth, and she was probably a household slave. For these descendants of a slave people make slaves in their turn, perhaps not men slaves, but women are saleable commodities among a savage nation, and for a trifling consideration, a bottle of trade gin or a few sticks of trade tobacco, they will hand over a girl-child who, taken into the household without pay, holds the position of a servant and is therefore to all intents and purposes a slave. This is really not as bad as it sounds; her position is probably quite as good as it would be in her own tribe, and as she grows older she either marries or forms some sort of alliance with a Liberian. Loose connections and divorce are both so common that she is no worse off than the ordinary Liberian woman, and the admixture of good, strong virile blood may possibly help the future race. At least that is what I thought as I watched the congregation at prayer. They sang hymn choruses so beautifully as to bring tears to my eyes, and then they came outside and abused me because I wanted to photograph them. Had I been they, I should have objected to going out to the world as specimens of their people, but they need not have reviled me in the blatant, coarse manner of the negro who has just seen enough of civilisation to think he rules the universe. I did not press the matter, because I felt it would be ungracious to make a picture of them against their will. But clearly the lovely little homes were not in Lower Buchanan. Nor were they in Cape Palmas.

Far be it from me to say that plantations of some useful description do not exist. They may; I can only say I have seen no evidences of them in three of their towns or near those towns. I will put it on record that I did see some cabbage stalks behind some broken railings opposite the President's house in Monrovia, but that was absolutely the only thing in the shape of a garden, vegetable, fruit, or flower, that I did see in the environs of the towns. You can buy no fruit in Monrovia, no chickens, no eggs. Bananas and limes have to be imported. Meat is only to be had at rare intervals, and living is so frightfully dear that when the British Consul had, during my stay, to provide for a distressed British subject who had been unfortunate enough to get adrift in the land, he had to pay six shillings and sixpence a day for his board and lodging—a bare room, not over-clean, with a rough bed in it, and board that did not include meat, but consisted chiefly of manioc or cassava which is what the majority of the Liberians live on themselves.

The country as a matter of fact lives on the Custom's dues which reach about £70,000 a year and are levied not only on the goods that they themselves use but on those the unfortunate natives of the hinterland require. No Liberian is a craftsman even of the humblest sort. The Kroo men are fishermen and boatmen; men from Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Lagos, with an occasional Vai tribesman thrown in, are painters, smiths, and carpenters. The Liberian, the descendant of the freed slave, despises these things; he aspires to be a gentleman of leisure, to serve in the Government Service, or in the Church, to walk about in a black suit with a high collar and a silver-mounted cane. Then apparently he is happy even if he come out of the most dilapidated house in Monrovia. There are, I believe, exceptions. I wonder, considering their antecedents and the conditions under which they have had to exist, whether one could expect more. Possibly it should be counted to them for great righteousness if any good men be found among them at all. But taken as a whole the Liberians after close on ninety years of self-government must strike the stranger as an effete race, blatant and arrogant of speech, an arrogance that is only equalled by their appalling ignorance, a race that compares shockingly with the Mandingo or Jolloff of the Gambia, the stately Ashanti, a warrior with reserve power, or the busy agricultural Yoruba. These men are gentlemen in their own simple, untutored way, courteous and dignified. The Liberian is only a travesty of the European, arrogant without proper dignity, boastful with absolutely nothing in the world to boast about unless it be the amazing wealth of the country he mismanages so shamefully. For Liberia is a rich country; it has a soil of surpassing fertility, and it seems to me that almost anything in the way of tropical products might be produced there. That nothing is produced is due to the ignorance and idleness of these descendants of slaves who rule or misrule the land. Since the days of the iniquitous trade, that first brought her into touch with civilisation, West Africa has been exploited for the sake of the nations of the western world. No one till this present generation seems to have recognised that she had any rights. Now we realise that the black man must be considered at least as much as the white man, who has made himself his master. Now most settlements along the Coast are busy, prosperous, and, above all, sanitary. Only in Liberia, the civilised black man's own country, does a different state of things prevail; only here has the movement been retrograde.

An end must come, but who can say what this end will be.

The missionary girl who had given up all she held most dear, who had joined the noble band of martyrs and heroes for Africa, said she had done so because she had seen a letter from a black man just mentioning a chapter and verse of the New Testament. She had looked it up and read the prayer of the Macedonians. Strange, strange are the workings of the Unseen, cruel sometimes the penalties poor human nature takes upon itself. Who shall say that a Guiding Hand had not made that girl choose wisely for the development of her own character, and who shall say that some ultimate good may not yet come for beautiful, wealthy, poverty-stricken Liberia. That the civilised nations, sinking their own jealousies, may step in and save her despite herself, I think, is the only hope. But it must be as Paul would have saved, not as the pitiful Christ. For the pendulum has swung too far back; the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. She does not know it herself, she will resent bitterly the imputation, but to me Liberia seems to be stretching out her hands crying dumbly to the white man the cry that came across the water of old, the cry the missionary girl listened to, the cry of Macedonia, “Come over and help us.”

But I was one who only heard the cry in passing, who felt that I at least could not help. I went on in the Chama to Axim, interested with what I had seen, but forgetting much in what I thought was to be my first hammock-trip alone. For I wanted to go to Half Assinie, and since no one may be sure of landing all their gear in safety on that surf-bound coast, I had to land at Axim and go back overland the fifty miles to the French border, and I thought I should have to do it alone.