Of all these thousands of islands (many coral islands are only a few feet above water) the most important are the Hawaiian islands, where Captain Cook was murdered by the natives on his way home in 1779. In 1810 they became the centre of a large South Sea Empire which continued to exist until 1893, when they were annexed by the United States. Apart from their great fertility, they are of tremendous importance as half-way stations between America and Asia.
They are a bit shaky. Kilauea, a volcano with the unusual height of 4100 feet, continues to be active. The volcano on Maui, another island of the group, has the biggest crater of the world. But the marvellous climate easily makes up for an occasional worried glance at the smoke plumes of these old but none too trustworthy friends. Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, is the capital.
The most important city of the Fiji islands is Suva, a port of call for steamers from America to Australia and New Zealand.
The capital of Samoa is Apia.
Another island of which you sometimes hear is Guam, in the Ladrones, half way between Japan and New Guinea and an important American cable station.
THE CORAL ISLAND
Then there is Tahiti, a French possession among the Society islands, where the South Sea film stories are supposed to come from.
Finally there are dozens and dozens of other islands belonging to the three general groups of Melanesia (islands with black inhabitants), and Micronesia (small islands), and Polynesia (many islands). They seem to form regular barriers across the Pacific, running in three parallel belts from north-west to south-east, and making navigation in the Pacific something very different from that in the Atlantic, where Rockall is the only danger spot between Ireland and the American coast.
It is said that these islands offer a most agreeable home to all those who find our modern machine-made civilization too complicated for their simple tastes and who prefer peace and quiet and agreeable companions to noise and hurry and the angry looks of jealous competitors. I suppose they are more restful than, let us say, Piccadilly Circus. But they are so dreadfully far away—and do they really grow a herb that will allow the average man to escape from himself?
Chapter XLV
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AFRICA, THE CONTINENT OF CONTRADICTIONS AND CONTRASTS
Africa, like Australia, is the remnant of a much older continent, the greater part of which disappeared beneath the sea a great many millions of years ago. Until comparatively recent geological times it was still connected with Europe. Arabia, geographically speaking a continuation of the Sahara, and Madagascar, which has the fauna and flora of Africa, Asia, and Australia, seem to indicate that there may have been a land connexion between these three continents as recently as the era during which life first appeared upon our planet.
It is all very complicated, and we shall have to discover a great many more data before we shall be able to say: “It was thus and thus and not otherwise.” In the meanwhile it is not a bad idea to mention these theories. They show us that the surface of our planet is constantly changing—that nothing is to-day quite as it was yesterday, and that our ancestors a million years hence will look at our maps (if they are still interested in our funny little globe, having long since learned to fly to other and bigger planets) with ill-concealed surprise, just as we contemplate a hypothetical map of the Tertian or Silurian age, and ask ourselves: “Can such things ever have been?”
What finally remained of all this ancient territory and what has not changed since the beginning of our so-called ‘historical times’ consists of two parts, a large square of land north of the Equator and a smaller triangle south of the Equator. But both the square and the triangle suffer from the same geographical disadvantage. Their outer rims are higher than the interior, and as a result the interior resembles a gigantic saucer. Such a condition, as we have already seen in the case of Australia, is very bad for the country at large. The high edges of the saucer prevent the sea winds from penetrating into the interior, which is therefore apt to turn into a desert, and furthermore they deprive that interior of its natural outlets to the sea. For when the African rivers finally reach the ocean, after having wandered all over the landscape, they must break their way through the rim of the saucer. That means that they suffer from waterfalls and cataracts where they are least wanted. It means that ships cannot use these rivers to reach the interior of the country. It means that trade must wait until artificial harbours have been constructed, and until railways have been built that circumnavigate the waterfalls. In short, it means isolation.
To most of us Africa is merely the ‘black continent,’ and we usually associate it with tropical forests and Negroes. As a matter of fact much of it, perhaps one-third of the 11,300,000 square miles which the continent occupies (it is therefore three times as large as Europe), is desert and of little value. The population of 140,000,000 is divided into three groups of which one, that of the Negroes, is black, while the other two, the Hamites and the Semites, vary all the way from a dark chocolate to the whiteness of polished ivory.
It is natural, however, that the Negro should have forced himself more upon our attention than his lighter-coloured neighbours. Not only does he impress us as something strange when we first see him, but the mistaken economic conceptions of our ancestors uprooted him from his primitive forests to use him as a cheap and docile form of labour, and it is not always pleasant to be reminded of this disgraceful error of judgment. For Negro slavery has been one of the worst misfortunes that could possibly have overtaken both races, that of the white man as well as that of the black. We shall return to it a little later, but we must first talk of Africa as it was before the invention of Negro slavery.
AFRICA
The Greeks were familiar with Egypt and with the Hamitic race which inhabited the valley of the Nile. The Hamitic races had occupied northern Africa at a very early date and had pushed the original, darker-skinned inhabitants southward in the general direction of the Sudan while keeping the northern border of the Mediterranean for their own exclusive use. The term ‘Hamitic’ is a very vague one. There are no typical Hamites as there are typical Swedes or Chinamen. The Hamites are a mixture of Aryans and Semites with a heavy sprinkling of Negro and a number of older races that were already on the premises when these invaders from the east made their first entry.
When they reached Africa they were probably still in the nomadic stage of development, and as a result they spread up the valley of the Nile and went farther southward into Abyssinia and westward as far as the Adanfic seaboard. The Berbers of the Adas Mountains are pure Hamites—or as pure as any Hamite can possibly be—and several of the wandering tribes of the Sahara are of Hamitic origin. The Abyssinians, on the other hand, are now so hopelessly mixed with Semites as to have lost a great many of their Hamitic traits. While the Fellahin, the small-boned farmers of the Nile valley, are also of Hamitic stock, although mixed beyond recognition by thousands of years of intermarriage with other races.
As a rule when we try to classify different races language comes to our rescue. But in northern Africa the spoken tongue is of very little help. There are Semitic tribes which speak only Hamitic, and Hamitic tribes which speak only Arabic, while the Copts, who are Christian and probably the descendants of the ancient ruling caste of Egypt, are the only people who have retained a knowledge of the ancient Hamitic tongue. The Greeks and Romans were apparently just as much puzzled as we are. They solved the difficulty by calling all the people who came from this neck of the woods ‘Ethiopians,’ or ‘burnt faces.’ They wondered at their pyramids and at the negroid lips of their Sphinx (or are the lips Hamitic? ask the professors) and admired the patience of their long-suffering peasants and the wisdom of their mathematicians and the learning of their physicians, but they never seemed to have bothered to ask where these people might have come from. They spoke of them as Ethiopians.
One word of warning! If you should go to North Africa, be careful not to call all these people ‘Niggers’ just because they are often rather
dark-skinned. They might resent it, and some of them are among the best fighters in the world. They have got the blood in them of those Egyptian warriors who conquered the whole of western Asia. They may even he the descendants of those Semitic Carthaginians who almost deprived Rome of the mastery of the Mediterranean. They may be the great-grandchildren of those Arab conquerors who not so very long ago overran the whole of southern Europe, or the children of those Algerian chieftains who put up such a terrific struggle when France tried to conquer Algeria and when Italy tried to get a foothold in Tunisia. Even if their hair be a little kinky, be careful and remember the fatal day in 1896 when the fuzzy-haired Ethiopians pushed the white-skinned Italians into the Red Sea.
So much for the Hamites, the first people the Europeans saw after they had sailed successfully across the Mediterranean. And little need be added about the Semites, with whom the Europeans came into very painful contact when Hannibal introduced the domesticated elephant to the plains of the Po. But once Carthage had been destroyed the road to Africa lay open; and it is a curious fret that so few Europeans availed themselves of the opportunity to find out what lay beyond that vast sandy region to which the Romans had given the name of Numidia.
Nero, of all emperors, was the first to take a serious interest in African exploration. His expeditions apparently got as far as that village of Fashoda which some thirty years ago was almost the cause of a war between France and England. But the Nero Nile expedition does not seem to have been the white man’s farthest south even in those long ago days. It now seems likely that the Carthaginians several centuries before had already crossed the Sahara and had visited the Gulf of Guinea. But Carthage had been destroyed, and all knowledge about that central part of Africa was definitely lost. For the Sahara was a barrier which frightened even the hardiest explorers. They might, of course, have followed the coast regions. Europe has a coastline of 23,000 miles, while Africa, three times its size, has a coastline of only 19,000 miles. And these were so completely lacking in harbours that the problem of getting a fresh water supply became an almost insurmountable obstacle. As a result, navigators who wanted to land anywhere on the African coast were obliged to drop anchor several miles away from land and must then cross the surf in an open boat, a procedure so uncomfortable and so dangerous that few tried it.
And so we had to wait until the beginning of the nineteenth century to learn a few definite facts about the geography of Africa. Even then these sources of information were merely incidental, for the Portuguese, the first explorers of the African west coast, were on their way to the Indies and had very little interest in the land of the naked blackamoors. Since they could not reach India and China without circumnavigating that big barrier of the south, they felt their way along the African coast as carefully as a blind man trying to get out of a dark room. Without in any way looking for them, they stumbled upon several islands, the Azores and the Canary islands and Cape Verde islands. Finally in 1471 they reached the Equator. Then in 1488 Bartholomew Diaz spotted the Storm Cape, now the Cape of Good Hope, or briefly the Cape. In 1498 Vasco da Gama rounded that cape and definitely located the shortest route from Europe to the Indies.
When that had been done, Africa once more dropped out of mind. It was a hindrance to navigation. It was too hot and too dry, or too hot and too damp. The people were savages. The skippers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on their way to the Orient, called at the different islands, the Azores, Ascension, St Helena, whenever scurvy and a high death-rate among their sailors forced them to buy a few fresh vegetables. But African land to them was bad land. Give it a wide berth. And the poor heathen of that vast continent might have continued to dwell in peace if it had not been for the kindheartedness of the first man ordained a priest in the New World.
Bartolomé de las Casas was the son of a man who had accompanied Columbus on his original voyage to America. The son, appointed Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, received as compensation for his services a piece of land with the Indian occupants attached to it. In other words, he became a plain, ordinary slave-holder. Every Spaniard then living in the New World had a certain number of Indians who worked for him. It was a bad system but, like so many bad systems, it was tolerated because, being everybody’s business, it was nobody’s business. It just happened that las Casas one day clearly realized just how bad the system was and how unfair to the original owners of the land, who were now forced to work in the mines and perform all sorts of menial tasks which they never would have touched had they remained free.
ON THE WAY TO THE SLAVERY COAST
He went to Spain to do something about it. The ail powerful Cardinal Ximenes, confessor of Queen Isabella, thought that he was right, appointed him ‘Protector of the Indians’ and sent him back to America to write a report. Las Casas returned to Mexico but found his superiors completely cold on the subject. The Indians had been given unto the Christians to do their bidding, just like the animals of the field and the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea. (See Genesis i, 28.) Why start something that would upset the entire economic fabric of the New World and furthermore would very seriously interfere with profits?
Then las Casas, who took his God-given task very seriously, had a bright idea. The Indian preferred death to captivity, as had been proved in Haiti where the number of natives had dropped from 1,000,000 to 60,000 in less than fifteen years. But the Negro of Africa did not seem to mind being a slave. In 1516 (direful date in the history of the New World) las Casas published the details of his famous humanitarian scheme for the complete liberation of his Indian charges. Each Spaniard living in the New Spain was to be granted the right to import twelve African Negroes, and the Indians were to be allowed to return to what remained of their own farms after the immigrants had deprived them of the better parts.
Poor las Casas lived long enough to come to a true realization of what he had done. His shame (for he was an honest man) was such that he retired to a monastery in Haiti. Afterwards he returned to public life and tried once more to fight the battles of the unfortunate heathen. But nobody listened to him, and when he died in 1556 new plans were under way to bind the Indians even more fully to the soil, and the African slave trade too was in full swing.
What this trade meant to Africa during the 300 years of its existence we can only guess from the few reliable figures that have come down to us. The actual slave-hunting was not done by white men. The Arabs, who could wander at will over the entire northern part which, had gradually been converted to Mohammedanism, held a monopoly of that trade. They had sold an occasional shipload of blackamoors to the Portuguese since 1434, but their business did not assume the gigantic proportions of the later days until 1517. There was big money in it. The Emperor Charles V (he of the famous Habsburg chin) bestowed upon one of his Flemish friends a grant which allowed him to carry 4000 African slaves each year to Haiti, Cuba, and Porto Rico. The Fleming at once sold his imperial patent to a Genoese speculator who paid him 25,000 ducats for it. The Genoese in turn sold it to a combination of Portuguese, and these Portuguese went to Africa and got in touch with the Arab dealers and the Arab dealers raided a number of Sudanese villages until they had about 10,000 slaves together (one must count on a heavy percentage of loss during the voyage) who were then packed into the hold of some evil-smelling carack and despatched across the ocean.
Rumours of this new and easy way to get rich spread far and wide. The Papal Bull which had divided the whole world into two halves, one of which belonged to Spain and one to Portugal, made it impossible for the Spaniards to visit the ‘slave coast’ themselves. The actual business of buying and transporting this black merchandise was therefore left to the Portuguese. But as soon as the power of the Portuguese had been broken by the English and the Dutch, slave-running became a monopoly of these two Christian nations. They continued to provide all the world with their ‘black ivory’ (as the Bristol and London merchants playfully called it) until 1807, when Parliament finally passed a Bill making the traffic in sl
aves a felony punishable with a fine and deportation. But it was a long time from 1517 until 1807 and until even afterwards, for slave-smuggling continued in spite of all the English warships until 1833, when the British Parliament voted £20,000,000 to compensate the slave owners in British colonies for emancipating their slaves. It did not fully come to an end until the early sixties of the nineteenth century, when practically all European and American nations had abolished slavery definitely (the Argentine abolished it in 1813, Mexico in 1829, U.S.A. in 1863, Brazil in 1888).
THE DELTA OF THE NILE
How important the trade was in the eyes of Europe’s rulers and statesmen is proved by the efforts they made to gain a monopoly of the slave traffic for the sole benefit of their own country. The refusal of Spain to continue a slave contract, thus far held by a few English merchants, even led to a war between England and Spain; and one of the stipulations of the famous peace treaty of Utrecht definitely transferred the West India slave monopoly from the Dutch to the English. Not to be outdone, the Dutch, who in 1620 had landed the first African slaves on Virginian soil, hastened to avail themselves of a law passed during the reign of William and Mary which had opened up the slave trade with the colonies to all the nations of the world. Indeed the Dutch West India Company, which through its scandalous neglect was responsible for the loss of Nieuw Amsterdam, only escaped bankruptcy because it made so much money out of its traffic in slaves.
We have very few statistics upon the subject, for the slavers were usually not the sort of men who took a scientific interest in their business; but those we have are appalling. The French Cardinal Lavigerie, archbishop of Cartilage and founder of the famous Pères Blancs (the missionaries who have done so much good in northern Africa) and a man therefore thoroughly conversant with African affairs, estimated that at least 2,000,000 people per year had been lost to Africa on account of the slave trade, including those who were killed by the hardships of the march to the coast, the children who died because they were too young to be of any value and were therefore left to the mercies of the wild animals, and those who were actually shipped away to foreign shores.
The Home of Mankind Page 35