Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the
tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public
schools operated by the government as well as many others run by
American and English missions, a club where the white "mammies," as
all women are called, and the white officers--for Sierra Leone is a
coaling station on the Cape route to India, and is garrisoned
accordingly--play croquet, and bowl into a net.
When the officers are not bowling they are tramping into the
hinterland after tribes on the warpath from Liberia, and coming
back, perhaps wounded or racked with fever, or perhaps they do not
come back. On the day we landed they had just buried one of the
officers. On Saturday afternoon he had been playing tennis, during
the night the fever claimed him, and Sunday night he was dead.
That night as we pulled out to the steamer there came toward us in
black silhouette against the sun, setting blood-red into the lagoon,
two great canoes. They were coming from up the river piled high with
fruit and bark, with the women and children lying huddled in the
high bow and stern, while amidships the twelve men at the oars
strained and struggled until we saw every muscle rise under the
black skin.
As their stroke slackened, the man in the bow with the tom-tom beat
more savagely upon it, and shouted to them in shrill sharp cries.
Their eyes shone, their teeth clenched, the sweat streamed from
their naked bodies.
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