We crossed the equator

‘At last we anchor for the night just inside Nazareth Bay, for Nazareth Bay wants daylight to deal with, being rich in low islands and sand shoals. We crossed the Equator this afternoon.’ This is Mary Henrietta Kingsley, a Victorian traveller and explorer, born 160 years ago today. She became a respected expert on West African society and politics, and she authored two popular books based on her experiences - the first includes a few extracts from her diaries.

Kingsley was born in London on 13 October 1862, the daughter and oldest child of physician, traveller and writer George Kingsley, and niece of novelists Charles Kingsley and Henry Kingsley. The family moved to Highgate less than a year after her birth. She received little in the way of a formal education, though she did have access to her father’s large library, and she loved to listen to his travel stories. Later, once her brother Charley had been admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge, she benefitted from his academic connections. When her parents fell infirm, it was Mary who was by their bedside, until their deaths in 1892. 

Thereafter, with a reasonable inheritance, Kingsley was able to travel herself, first to the Canary Islands, and then to explore West Africa (twice), where she often immersed herself among the native peoples. On one expedition, she travelled through the country of the Fang, a tribe with a reputation for cannibalism, having many harrowing adventures apparently. She also collected natural history samples - not least specimens of fish previously unknown to western science - for the British Museum. Through her experiences, she acquired a detailed knowledge of West African society and politics.

Back in England, Kingsley spent several years touring and giving lectures to a wide variety of audiences about life in Africa. She was the first woman to address the Liverpool and Manchester chambers of commerce; but she also ran into trouble with the church for criticising missionaries who were engaged, she felt, in corrupting local religious practices. Hugely sympathetic to the Africans’ ways of life, her views were often controversial. Wikipedia has this analysis: ‘[Her] beliefs about cultural and economic imperialism are complex and widely debated by scholars today. Though, on the one hand, she regarded African people and cultures as those who needed protection and preservation, she also believed in the necessity of British economic and technological influence and in indirect rule, insisting that there was some work in West Africa that had to be completed by white men.’

After the outbreak of the Second Boer War, Kingsley travelled to Cape Town where she volunteered as a nurse. However, she soon contracted typhoid, and she died in June 1900, not yet 40 years old. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, British Empire, or The Victorian Web. 

Kingsley kept detailed diaries on her travels, and later published two books based on those diaries. The first - Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons published by Macmillan in 1897 - was an immediate best-seller, and added to her academic prestige. (This is freely available online at Internet Archive or Googlebooks). She followed it two years later with West African Studies (1899). 

The first of Kingsley’s two books includes some - rather few - extracts from her diaries, and even those fade into the main narrative, so it is not always clear where the diary extracts end. At the start of Chapter 4, she goes to some lengths to explain why she put any diary extracts in at all.

‘I MUST pause here to explain my reasons for giving extracts from my diary, being informed on excellent authority that publishing a diary is a form of literary crime. Such being the case I have to urge in extenuation of my committing it that -Firstly, I have not done it before, for so far I have given a sketchy résumé of many diaries kept by me while visiting the regions I have attempted to describe. Secondly, no one expects literature in a book of travel. Thirdly, there are things to be said in favour of the diary form, particularly when it is kept in a little known and wild region, for the reader gets therein notice of things that, although unimportant in themselves, yet go to make up the conditions of life under which men and things exist. The worst of it is these things are not often presented in their due and proper proportion in diaries. Many pages in my journals that I will spare you display this crime to perfection.’

And then she includes the first verbatim extract from her diary.

5 June 1895
‘Off on Mové at 9.30. Passengers, Mr. Hudson, Mr. Woods, Mr. Huyghens, Père Steinitz, and I. There are black deck-passengers galore; Ï do not know their honourable names, but they are evidently very much married men, for there is quite a gorgeously coloured little crowd of ladies to see them off. They salute me as I pass down the pier, and start inquiries. I say hastily to them: “Farewell, I’m off up river,” for I notice Mr. Fildes bearing down on me, and I don’t want him to drop in on the subject of society interest. I expect it is settled now, or pretty nearly. There is a considerable amount of mild uproar among the black contingent, and the Mové firmly clears off before half the good advice and good wishes for the black husbands are aboard. She is a fine little vessel; far finer than I expected. The accommodation I am getting is excellent. A long, narrow cabin, with one bunk in it and pretty nearly everything one can wish for, and a copying press thrown in. Food is excellent, society charming, captain and engineer quite acquisitions. The saloon is square and roomy for the size of the vessel, and most things, from row-locks to teapots, are kept under the seats in good nautical style. We call at the guard-ship to pass our papers, and then steam ahead out of the Gaboon estuary to the south, round Pongara Point, keeping close into the land. About forty feet from shore there is a good free channel for vessels with a light draught which if you do not take, you have to make a big sweep seaward to avoid a reef. Between four and five miles below Pongara, we pass Point Gombi, which is fitted with a lighthouse, a lively and conspicuous structure by day as well as night. It is perched on a knoll, close to the extremity of the long arm of low, sandy ground, and is painted black and white, in horizontal bands, which, in conjunction with its general figure, give it a pagoda-like appearance.

Alongside it are a white-painted, red-roofed house for the light-house keeper, and a store for its oil. The light is either a flashing or a revolving or a stationary one, when it is alight. One must be accurate about these things, and my knowledge regarding it is from information received, and amounts to the above. I cannot throw in any personal experience, because I have never passed it at night-time, and seen from Glass it seems just steady. Most lighthouses on this Coast give up fancy tricks, like flashing or revolving, pretty soon after they are established. Seventy-five percent, of them are not alight half the time at all. “It’s the climate.” Gombi, however, you may depend on for being alight at night, and I have no hesitation in saying you can see it, when it is visible, seventeen miles out to sea, and that the knoll on which the lighthouse stands is a grass-covered sand cliff, about forty or fifty feet above sea-level. As we pass round Gombi point, the weather becomes distinctly rough, particularly at lunch-time. The Mové minds it less than her passengers, and stamps steadily along past the wooded shore, behind which shows a distant range of blue hills. Silence falls upon the black passengers, who assume recumbent positions on the deck, and suffer. All the things from under the saloon seats come out and dance together, and play puss-in-the-corner, after the fashion of loose gear when there is any sea on.

As the night comes down, the scene becomes more and more picturesque. The moonlit sea, shimmering and breaking on the darkened shore, the black forest and the hills silhouetted against the star-powdered purple sky, and, at my feet, the engine-room stoke-hole, lit with the rose-coloured glow from its furnace, showing by the great wood fire the two nearly naked Krumen stokers, shining like polished bronze in their perspiration, as they throw in on to the fire the billets of redwood that look like freshly-cut chunks of flesh. The white engineer hovers round the mouth of the pit, shouting down directions and ever and anon plunging down the little iron ladder to carry them out himself. At intervals he stands on the rail with his head craned round the edge of the sun deck to listen to the captain, who is up on the little deck above, for there is no telegraph to the engines, and our gallant commanders voice is not strong. While the white engineer is roosting on the rail, the black engineer comes partially up the ladder and gazes hard at me; so I give him a wad of tobacco, and he plainly regards me as inspired, for of course that was what he wanted. Remember that whenever you see a man, black or white, filled with a nameless longing, it is tobacco he requires. Grim despair accompanied by a gusty temper indicates something wrong with his pipe, in which case offer him a straightened-out hairpin. The black engineer having got his tobacco, goes below to the stokehole again and smokes a short clay as black and as strong as himself. The captain affects an immense churchwarden. How he gets through life, waving it about as he does, without smashing it ever two minutes, I cannot make out.

At last we anchor for the night just inside Nazareth Bay, for Nazareth Bay wants daylight to deal with, being rich in low islands and sand shoals. We crossed the Equator this afternoon.’