Henry Stanley

Scribner’s/January, 1891

In my book “In Darkest Africa,” I have slightly hinted at the complacent self-satisfaction that I derived from regarding anything ancient that belonged to man, or to the work of his hands, and of the reverence I felt on first seeing the Pigmy Adam and his female consort in the wild Eden of Avatiko, near the banks of the Ituri River. I feel strongly on this subject, and have done so for many years. It was apparent to me for the first time, when I was in Washington, in 1872, while conversing with a South Carolina senator, who thought fit to go to an opposite extreme on discovering my favorable inclinations to the Dark Man of Inner Africa. The senator’s rather warm allusions to abolitionist principles immediately provoked a silent indignation against his narrowness of mind, and I mentally condemned him as a man whose ignorance prevented him from regarding man philosophically. I find it is a common failing with the man of civilized lands, of America or elsewhere. One of the most frequent questions put to me since my return from Africa is: “Is the pigmy a real human being?” Another is: “Is the pigmy capable of reasoning?” And another is: “Do you think he can argue rationally about what he sees; or, in other words, has he any mind at all?” And whenever I hear such questions I mentally say: “Truly, I see no difference between the civilized man and the pigmy! For if the latter could but speak his thoughts in a dialect familiar to me, there is not the slightest doubt that he would have asked me, ‘Can the civilized man reason like us men of the forest?’ ”

For the benefit of such of your readers as take an interest in pigmy humanity, I have taken the trouble to write this article, that they may have a little more considerateness for the undersized creatures inhabiting the Great Forest of Equatorial Africa. They must relieve their minds of the Darwinian theory, avoid coupling man with the ape, and banish all thoughts of the fictitious small-brained progenitor supposed to be existing somewhere on land unsubmerged since the Eocene period. For there is no positive evidence as yet that man was otherwise than he is to-day, viz., a biped endowed with mind. Think of troglodytes, pile-villagers, bog-men, riverdrift-men, cave-men, men of the stone, bronze, iron, or steel ages, down to the highly cultured Bostonian men and women of the period, and we can produce evidences to prove that man, throughout all periods since he came on the earth, has been a creature separate and distinct from all others, from the fact that he possessed a mind. Intellectually, the pigmies of the African forest are the equals of about fifty percent of the modern inhabitants of any great American city of today. And yet there has been no change, or progress of any kind, among the pigmies of the forest since the time of Herodotus. As the bird has built its nest, the bee its cell, and the ant its new colony, the pigmies have survived the lapse of twenty-three centuries, and have continued to build their beehive huts after the same skilless fashion as they built them in the days when Herodotus recited the story of his travels before the Council of Athens, 445 years before the birth of Christ. The reason of this is obvious from my point of view, which is, that the same causes which operated before the time of Herodotus to drive them out of their original lands continue to operate today to keep them in the low, degraded state they are now in. Africa, more than any other continent, has been subject to waves of migrating peoples, who have been continually dispossessing their predecessors. Many centuries before the Asiatics came to lower Egypt, the ancestors of the pigmies must have occupied the Delta of the Nile, possibly while the cave-men inhabited Britain and western Europe. In the time when the Nassamonian explorers were captured by the pigmies, the little people were established in large communities on the banks of the Niger, somewhere in the neighborhood of Timbuctoo. Within the memory of the oldest herdsman living in Unyoro, they were located on Lake Albert, near the equator. It will be inferred, then, that though it is stated above that there has been no progress or change during twenty-nine centuries among the pigmies, that in prehistoric times, much anterior to the building of the pyramids —probably twenty or thirty centuries —the ancestors of the pigmies were in much more comfortable circumstances than their wild progeny are to-day, within the recesses of the sappy woods of the rainy zone of Africa; that there has been a degradation, in fact, though not to any great extent, from a former happier state. Like all other nations, tribes, or communities unhappily located in the way of advancing nations and tribes of superior numbers, strength, arts, or qualities, the pigmies have been obliged to retreat, with lessening numbers and in shattered fragments, to take refuge in swamps or woods, to wander and seek a precarious subsistence in regions least likely to invite pursuers.

Interesting as the subject is, however, we may not dwell long on it, as it more particularly belongs to prehistoric anthropology, and, therefore, I will pass on to the description of the pigmies and their homes, as we discovered them in the Great Forest.

We are first indebted to Herodotus for the discovery of the pigmies, and, secondly, to Andrew Battel, of Leigh. Then Moffat and Livingstone introduced us to the Bushmen of South Africa. But the earliest knowledge of the pigmies of central Equatorial Africa was given us by Schweinfurth and Piaggia, who had travelled to Niam-Niam and Monbutta Land, which countries are situated on the northern edge of the Great Forest. In my journey down the Congo in 1876 and 1877, we heard of the Watwa or Batwa Dwarfs on the southern edge of the forest region, and we captured one specimen; but as he might have been a mere isolated instance of human monstrosity, we laid no great stress on the capture. Later, in 1881 and 1882, I heard of the Batwa again, from natives who were evidently very familiar with them; but in our journey for the relief and rescue of Emin Pasha we travelled through the centre of the region inhabited by the Wambutti dwarfs, during which we captured about fifty of them, of various ages and of both sexes. On meeting with Emin Pasha, and Captain Casati, we found that the former had a woman in his employ, about twenty-five years old, and that the latter had secured for his service a yellow-bodied boy of about thirteen, both being undoubted specimens of the pigmy race. Our own dwarf captives at that period were six, so that we possessed eight specimens of different ages in our camp at Kavalli at one time. Emin carefully measured the little people, and I took some half a dozen photographs of them.

As we travelled nearly 1,700 miles through the forest in our marches to and fro, we came across a particular section of the forest region situated between the Ihuru and Ituri Rivers—about 30,000 square miles in extent—which simply swarms with the pigmies. We passed, some days, by dozens of their forest encampments, and we discovered, by timing our distances, that a pigmy village was from an hour to an hour and a half from an agricultural settlement of the larger aborigines, and that the settlements were invariably surround by the villages or hutted camps of the undersized forest nomads. At every settlement, if we found it well furnished with plantain plantations, we invariably dispatched squads of scouts in every direction to obtain knowledge of the intricate paths, to discover food supplies, and capture any stray natives from whom we could elicit information of our whereabouts. By the means of these, scores of curious representatives of the homines sylvestres of Africa were brought to me for examination, and it would be difficult to say whether the wild people of the woods or we expressed the greatest surprise at meeting. When a squad of natives entered camp, it was the signal for a rush of everybody with us toward headquarters to obtain a view of the aborigines, for as there were three distinct races in the forest, the sizes, height, and color of the captives differed greatly.

The aborigines who fell the woods, make clearings, and plant bananas, plantains, corn, beans, and tobacco, are finely formed men and women of the ordinary standard, of a light bronze or coppery color, and though they have strange ideas of personal decoration, such as piercing the upper lip, and placing wooden pegs, iron rings, shell or wooden disks of the size of ulster buttons in the holes, and wearing necklaces of chimpanzee, monkey, crocodile, and human teeth, they are not more than usually remarkable in any way; but they are head and shoulders above the tallest pigmies in height. As a rough mode of estimating the height of the latter, any person five feet six inches high could use a crutch which would be within an inch of the exact standard of an adult male or female of the pigmies. But the dwarfs—like ordinary humanity—vary considerably in height. We have measured a few who were only thirty-three inches high, and the tallest of the unadulterated specimens that we met would not exceed four feet four inches. As they advanced toward us through the camp, we often thought that the scouts had only captured a lot of children; but a nearer view would show full-grown women with well-developed breasts, who had clearly experienced the troubles of maternity, or adult males well advanced beyond the twenties. The Zanzibari boys of fourteen and fifteen years would often range themselves alongside of the men to measure themselves, and would manifest with loud laughter their pleasure at the discovery that there were fathers of families in existence not so tall as they.

We had heard reports that the pigmy warriors were distinguished for the length of their beards, but I only saw one who could be said to have a beard. Their bodies, however, were covered with a brown fell long enough to be easily seized with the fingers.

Their arms and ornaments were similar to those of the agricultural aborigines, and were evidently obtained from them in exchange for the produce of the forest, such as honey, furs of monkey and baboons, antelope and leopard skins, and feathers, especially the red tail feathers of the gray parrot, and for the dried meat of such animals as they trapped or speared. As it is not an easy matter to obtain meat in the forest in any regular quantity, an elephant imprisoned in one of those deep wedge-shaped pits, or speared from above by one of those ponderous spears weighted with a heavy piece of timber, and descending from a height of perhaps twenty feet with fatal force, would be a treasure. Such a store of meat and hide and ivory would purchase iron ornaments for the necks of the females, iron bracelets and leglets, and girdles of shells or iron balls; and a decent piece of bark cloth to cover nudity or as a protection from cold; assegais for the warriors, cruelly barbed arrows, tough little bows ornamented with monkey, wild-cat, civet, genet, or leopard tails; a leather quiver, a broad waist or shoulder belt, with hunting-knife and elaborately worked sheath, besides a vast store of plantains, ripe and green, and probably a capacious pot of plantain wine to boot, to cheer their hearts in the sad and damp gloom of the wilds, besides enabling the entire pigmy community to hold high revel on the intestines and stomach, which are regarded as delicacies. Or perhaps a buffalo or a big antelope has trodden on the frail covering of the treacherous pit, and been precipitated to the bottom to be impaled.

With their little bow-traps set thickly wherever the wood is haunted with monkeys and smaller game; these deep pits—excavated wherever the bigger animals might be supposed to seek for a place of cooler gloom, or darker recess, or a feast on bark or branch—covered over with sticks, a layer of leaves, and afterward a thin covering of earth; and the trap-sheds which are very cleverly constructed, one whole side of which is suspended like a trap-door, and which, weighted with rock or heavy timber, falls tight and fast over the unhappy victim of the woods that has happened to be tempted within the shed and unloosed the catch, the pigmy hunters manage to secure a fair amount of meat and means to live. The woods also furnish a vast variety of wild fruit, roots, plants, and fungi. A region that was called a wilderness by the members of the expedition, supplied its clever nomadic inhabitants with a variety of edibles which habit had’ accustomed them to. For several days in November, 1888, we followed the trail of a pigmy band, which was well marked by the skins of the amoma, the rinds of phrynium berries, nuts like those of a Spanish chestnut, and the brown, leathery, external skins of the entada scandens beans.

Nomad tribes of this kind are often, by pinching necessity, compelled to feed on a diet which would be poisonous, or would be utterly nauseous, to men bred up on grain and vegetables. The snails, tortoises, squirrels, mice, civets, ichneumons, snakes—large and small—caterpillars, white ants, crickets, grasshoppers, monkeys, chimpanzees, leopards, wild-cats, wart hogs, crocodiles, iguanas, lizards, antelopes, buffaloes, and elephants form a considerable variety for communities that are not too fastidious as to what they eat; and our experience of the pigmies leads me to believe that they relish each and all equally. We have seen the female captives, to whom the entrails of such animals as we killed were thrown, give us grateful glances, seize upon them, turn them for a few seconds over the fire, and eat filth and all with unmistakable enjoyment. They had been supplied with pots, and water was abundant; but they were either too ravenously hungry to wait for the cooking, or too indolent to exert themselves in the preparation of the food.

Such people as these, then, would have no hesitation to add human meat to their fare. It is a current fact everywhere through the forest region, and I am forced to believe it, though I have never seen the cannibals indulging in their repasts. The graves of our dead have been opened, and the bodies have been exhumed. Members of our expedition have been slain, and their bodies have been carved and carried away by the slayers; and one day we scattered a banqueting party who had just bled a woman in the neck, laid her out, and washed her. There were pots close by; there were also bunches of bananas, and the woman belonged to a hostile band. The inference is obvious; and anyone of our band of whites could furnish much circumstantial evidence of this kind. As the pigmies appear to have no earthly duties beyond providing for the necessities of the day, there is not the slightest doubt that a slain foe would be eaten. When we asked our captives whether they had ever indulged their depraved appetites by eating human meat, they always stoutly denied it, but accused their neighbors of doing so.

Such articles of use or ornament as the pigmies possess they have purchased or stolen from the agricultural aborigines. They themselves neither hoe, plant, nor manufacture. Their head-dresses belong to the fashion of the neighborhood they are in; their bark-cloth clout has been beaten into consistency by the planters and bartered to them for a scoopful of honey or a fur; their arms of defence, their utensils, their woodman’s knife or axe—in fact, everything has been obtained by purchase or theft.

Their weapons consist of a small barbed spear, a short bow with a quiver full of wooden- or iron-pointed arrows, a dagger, and a small, handy, double-edged knife attached by a string above the elbow of the left arm. The bow is of very tough red-wood, generally of iron-wood, and the string is a broad and polished strip of rattan—calamus—fibre. The bow is frequently decorated with tassels at the ends, and strengthened at the back by being run into a raw monkey-tail, which, on drying, gives it greater strength and preserves it. The arrows are short—not more than from eighteen to twenty-two inches long; if of wood, each is of the thickness of a lead-pencil, fined to a long, fine point, which is ringed with small cuts for three inches from the end. These cuts serve to retain the poison with which the arrows are smeared. If the arrows are pointed with iron, the blades are of exquisite fineness, as of a razor-blade, with two or several prongs extending outward, and attached to delicate little barrels of polished iron, into which the heads of the arrow-shafts are run. The arrow-blades have also grooves made in them which serve to secure the poison as they are put into or drawn out of the quiver. The quiver is a long, narrow bag made of antelope-goat hide, and can contain quite a hundred of these deadly weapons. When we have made a prisoner of a pigmy warrior, we have had to be careful in handling his stock of arrows, for even the dry poison is dangerous, though not necessarily deadly; but the fresh poison, when dark or reddish-brown, causes such awful agony that any other kind of death would be preferable.

When we first encountered the tribes who fought with poisoned arrows, we were not prepared to be greatly impressed with the danger, but we received a severe lesson in August, 1887, during a fight with the Avisibba savages. Young fellows, inspired by the example of Lieutenant Stairs, R. E., rushed with brave homicidal intentions to the front, and the tiny arrows sailed in showers past them; but some of them found their intended billets and were arrested quivering in arms and shoulders. With contemptuous smiles the young men drew them out and flung them away, and some continued answering the savages with rifle-shots, while others sought the surgeon, bearing with them the arrows with which they had been wounded. When the day’s fight was over, of course we had more leisure to examine the missiles, and our anxiety was great when we observed that they had been freshly smeared with a brown, gummy-like substance which emitted a subtle, acrid odor, with a suspicion of assafoetida in it. The arrows seemed to have been plunged into a pot containing a goodly quantity of a resinous substance, and twirled around in it and well soaked, and then lifted up in a bunch and covered over with a banana or a piece of phrynium leaf. Quivers full of the arrows showed us that the weapons were considered by their owners to be dangerous, for those so smeared were tied together, head downward, and apart from the others.

Yet the wounds made by these slender arrows were mere punctures, such as might have been made by finely pointed butchers’ skewers, and being exceedingly ignorant of the effect, we contented ourselves with syringing them with warm water and dressing them with bandages. In some instances affectionate men sucked their comrades’ wounds, to make sure that nothing of the substance should be left to irritate them. In no instance was this method of any avail. All who were wounded either died after terrible sufferings from tetanus, or developed such dreadful gangrenous tumors as to incapacitate them from duty for long periods, or wreck their constitutions so completely by blood-poisoning that their lives became a burden to them.

It was a long time before we could find any antidote for this poison; such captives as we possessed professed not to understand any dialect we knew; but at a venture we tried, after a year’s experience of forest fighting, the effect of hypodermic injections of carbonate of ammonium in the neighborhood of the wounds, and our losses were much less in consequence.

A pigmy queen, or rather a pigmy chief’s wife, who had become attached to a member of our expedition, pointed out an arum as the source whence the forest natives extracted their poison. She also professed to be acquainted with an herb which could be used as an antidote, but circumstances prevented her gratifying us with a sight of it.

Various conjectures were made by the older “journey-makers,” as the veteran black travelers call themselves, as to the plants which furnished the black poison. Some asserted that it was made out of the juice of the india-rubber vine. Personally, I concluded that the red resinous substance must have been made out of the dried bodies of the red ants, packets of which we found in almost every hut of the Avisibba village. It is possible we were all wrong, and that the latter, especially, was made out of the strophanthus hispidus, a plant peculiar to Africa, which is best described by Sir John Kirk as being a woody climber with a stem several inches in diameter, which has a very rough bark, and hangs from tree to tree like a bush-vine. Chemists, according to Dr. Fraser, Professor of Materia Medica in the University of Edinburgh, have experimented upon the plant, and have extracted a drug called strophanthin from the seeds; and it is said that one-tenth of a grain of it is rapidly fatal to a frog.

Among the pigmies there are two distinct types, differing widely from one another. One is a clear light-bronze in color, the other is much darker, almost black. The former is distinguished by an open look—the eyes are far apart, large, protuberant, and of a brilliant, flashing, limpid black, reminding one of the eyes of gazelles; the skin on the face of youth has the sheen of old yellow ivory, that on the body is of a sober light brown. The darker race are distinguished for great prognathy of jaw, tapering at the chin almost to a point; the eyes are deeply set, and close together; the nasal bridge greatly sunk. They have narrow, retreating foreheads, projecting lips, the skin of the body is rough, and the fell is very marked. But both are specially distinguished for their small, delicate hands, tapered fingers, and narrow, highly arched feet.

We have seen some—a few — who might be said to be well formed. The little plump beauty we saw with Ugarrowwa—an ivory raider—was a bewitching little creature thirty-three inches high. It is possible that this beauty was due to perfect health and the good food with which she was fed by the Arab. She was certainly a gem worth seeing, and self-possessed as a well-bred lady. Artists would have doated on her, and sculptors would have paid goodly sums for such a miniature model. She was young, just at the dawn of womanhood, and her youth and girlish innocence made her simply charming.

The chief’s wife, captured by Uledi, the hero of the “Dark Continent,” already mentioned, was also an exceedingly interesting young woman. She was brought to camp—yellow and shining as the moon—wearing no garment on her body, but heavily decorated with leglets of shining iron, armlets and bracelets and collars of the same polished metal. Her hair was short, and her face was round, and glistened with oil of the castor-plant. She was very quiet, and gracefully complied with her new duties, and in a short time she became a general favorite. She was assigned to a kind and generous master, to whom she became deeply attached, and watched his house with the fidelity of a spaniel.

We had sufficient experience of the pigmies to justify us in the assertion that the very lowest of African humanity is as capable of improvement as the children of Europeans. This chief’s wife, just mentioned, was the most devoted of servants, and in a few months was as well able to perform the duties of a domestic as the most industrious, willing, and cheerful English charwoman or maid. An old pigmy woman, forty-five or fifty years old, was several months with us before she impressed us as being amenable to the discipline, or rather routine, of an orderly household; but finally she proved herself also a tractable creature, without anyone having recourse to violence. Her duties were simple but heavy. She carried her master’s pots and kettles on the march, and, after a little rest, collected fuel, made the fire, procured water, and cooked the evening meal. She was long learning to be cleanly and to wash her hands before handling the food, but in time she satisfied all reasonable expectations. Except on one point she became perfect in her limited sphere, and that was, she never could learn to control her tongue. That member was utterly ungovernable; but on the principle of give and take, her liberty in this respect was conceded to her by her master, and she made free use of it. What it was all about, or whether she indulged in coarse invectives and wicked language, we never could learn. There was humor in her, however, as I found in the following manner: :

She was captured, with five others of her tribe, in November, 1888. When asked where the plantain plantation might be found, she pointed east-northeast. We followed her a short day’s march, but found nothing. We sent her then ahead with the foragers, and the results were poor; but she still insisted that Indepessu, a large settlement, was still east-northeast. According to my chart it lay southeast; we therefore declined to employ her as guide, and sent her to the rear. But every day, for quite a period, she pointed east-northeast with her hand, and with graphic pantomime tried to tempt us in the direction where she described the plantains to be as thick as her thighs. However, we still persisted in our own notions of our proper course, to her unutterable disgust and scorn of our pig-headedness. Each day she saw me she made gestures to indicate her belief that I was leading everybody to destruction. However, continuing southeast, we found our old road, and every day’s march improved our prospects, until, at last, we came to a land of such astonishing plenty that her wrinkled face finally relaxed, and a settled content was visible. It was then my turn to ask her where Indepessu was. The manner of the reply she gave me proved to me that we understood one another, and ever after I had but to utter the word “Indepessu” to cause her to cease scolding and giggle roguishly.

A pigmy lad, of eighteen years or so, was another character. He had been caught while his tribe were striving to convey away a case of Remington ammunition, which the little people had found in the woods, where it had been deposited out of sight of the rear-guard by a lazy Soudanese corporal who was on the punishment list. The boy was described by an Irish officer as being as “fat as butter.” He was, in reality, a pudding-faced, plump, little creature. Though he had no infirmity, he was singularly silent. If spoken to, he affected such shyness that a question would have to be repeated half a dozen times before he yielded to speech, while the fingers of both hands traced strange figures on his thighs, and his head was bent down sideways. He was selected by a master who treated him most tenderly. He never attempted to desert, but followed the caravan in perfect freedom. Though observed while on the march and in camp, during work and at ease before the fire, not once did I see him engage in talk with his compatriots. He jogged on cheerfully, even zealously, with the caravan, bearing his heavy load with an affecting solicitude to keep pace with the foremost files. On arriving in camp he would cast quick glances around to discover the locale of his master’s quarters, then trot to the place, drop his load near the household stuff, and rush away to collect fuel, with a mind only on the duty to be done. Once on the plains, where fuel was scarce, a tall Soudanese snatched his pile of firewood from him. The pigmy lad cast one earnest, reproachful look on him, abandoned the contest, and began to seek for more. Had the second load of wood been taken from him, the little fellow would have shed a few tears silently, but he would have uttered no word.

These few experiences with the pigmies will serve to show that we think well of them, and that we had cause to become attached to them, and to marvel somewhat that these creatures of the uncleared forest, who are ever at war with the settlers, and live the life of beasts of prey, could adapt themselves so easily to the requirements of a strictly disciplined camp. They are many degrees below the larger aborigines in the knowledge of how to make themselves comfortable, and raise food for their families. They do not manufacture cloth out of tree-bark, nor do they know what trees will furnish dyes, or how to make pots and water-vessels out of earth, or how to make needles out of iron and bone, or how to smelt the hematite to reduce it to iron, or how to forge the iron into weapons of defence, or how to make nets of plant-fibre. They make no clearings, neither do they plant or sow, and their dwellings, though neat enough, are not to be compared to the laboriously constructed villages of the big agricultural tribes.

But these nomads have demonstrated that they have quick human sympathies, are affectionate, tractable, and teachable. They are courageous, and prompt to defend their families; they know how to select beautiful sylvan camps; they can find their way to any quarter of the compass through the primeval forest; the untenanted woods have no terror for them; they are powerful against the elephant and the leopard, more cunning than the chimpanzee; their craft enables them to trap the shy lemur or the knowing parrot. Neither bird nor beast can escape them. With the virtues of many plants they are familiar, and they know what wild edibles or esculents may be eaten with impunity. They make the larger tribes pay tribute to them, and the most powerful communities of settlers are glad of their forbearance.

Every now and then we hear of Europeans falling victims to the fury of elephants, or the ferocity of buffaloes. Gamble Keys was gored to pieces by a buffalo at Lukolela, Captain Deane was battered to death by an elephant, and the Hon. Guy Dawnay fell a victim to a buffalo bull. In almost every expedition I have lost one or two valuable Zanzibaris; yet they were all armed with perfect breech-loaders. The comparatively defenceless manikins, with equal courage but far greater craft, would destroy these animals without danger to themselves, and proceed about the operation with less tremor and concern. It is by their arts as hunters and trappers that they are able to defy starvation in the hungry shades of the eternal forest, and to possess all the utensils needed for the domestic life of the uncivilized man.

Their villages, situated under the impervious foliage of the largest clump of trees to be found near the locality where they propose camping, struck us as being comfortable, snug, and neat. I have seen ninety-two huts in one of these villages, arranged in a circle of about fifty yards in diameter. The pigmy camps are generally found at the crossways, where two or more paths intersect, and are from two to three miles distant from agricultural settlements. Our anxieties always lessened on meeting them, for the more paths we found, the more we were assured of food, and the roads improved.

Sometimes these forest-villages were planted midway between parallel lines of settlements. A short walk from our camp through the woods, north or south, would take us to plantations large enough to supply a regiment with food. One time we came to a group of dwarf villages whence a broad path six feet wide communicated with another group three miles distant. This road was a revelation. It informed us that the tribe was more than usually powerful; that it was well established; that the chief possessed power, and was permitted to exercise it. Outside of the great kingdom of Uganda we had not seen in Africa a cut road longer than half a mile.

The huts in every pigmy camp were of a tortoise-back figure. The doorways were not more than three feet high, and were placed at the ends, one being for daily use, and the other, which fronted the bush, for escape. Those for constant convenience looked out on the circular common and pointed to the centre, where stood the tribal chief’s hut, as though the duty of every household was to watch over the safety of him who ruled the community. We rarely found a hut higher than four feet six inches. In length they varied from seven to ten feet, while the width would be from four and a half feet to seven. In what appeared to be old-established camps we found rough cots constructed, which were raised a few inches above the ground, after the style of our own forest couches. Several layers of phrynium leaves make a luxurious bed.

Though it is a necessity that every family is under of providing daily food, our scouts always found a pigmy camp well guarded; warriors and women and nearly all, except very young children, set out with the dawn to look after their bow-traps, pits, nets, and trap-sheds to secure the victims, and to collect berries, fruit, fungi, snails, or to make a raid upon a banana plantation. The few who remain maintain a sharp lookout over the camp and its belongings in the absence of the tribe. Though the raiding, or hunting, party take little with them save their weapons and empty baskets, habit and experience render them above such luxuries of equipment as are necessary to other than these hardy nomads. If a warrior requires a smoke, a little satchel contains his firesticks and tobacco; any ordinary leaf of the forest rolled up by supple, well-practised fingers, will furnish a pipe. If a woman needs to cook a mess of mushrooms, or a few green bananas, any banana frond or phrynium leaf will serve for an utensil, and good water is always abundant in the forest, and the hot embers will roast the banana. If a young antelope, any reptile or bird is secured during the tramp across country, it may be roasted whole, or kabobed, in the woods as well as in camp or in village. If any member through accident loses a fork-clout, a bunch of leaves depending from the girdle before and behind serves the purpose just as well, besides being cool and clean.

Meantime, during the absence of the tribe, the elderly warriors at home are not idle. The tracks to the camp are being skewered freely for a long distance, and a leaf lightly dropped over the deadly points covers each from view; parallel ways, fifty yards or so from the main road are prepared for private convenience and observation, and in the little huts placed a couple of rods or so in advance of the camp, along each way leading out of it, there is always one with sharp eyes and quick ears to sound the peculiar alarm cry. And anything so weird, or so startling, or so unlike the ordinary human note, I have not heard. One would think that a pigmy camp was, from its very poverty, safe from attack, but the little people, so mischievous, restless, and tricky, contrive to provoke hostility and revenge, and the agriculturists would be glad often of an opportunity to retaliate injuries and avenge the depredations they have suffered.

I have heard several captives of the larger humanity express their detestation of their small tormentors in much the same terms that Boer frontiersmen use in regard to the little Bushmen of South Africa, or the Western pioneers are recorded to have employed about the wild Indians of North America. By those who clear the forest, and plant vast plantations of bananas, and plots of cereals and tobacco, the pigmies are regarded as vermin who deserve extermination. Very provoking must they of necessity be. Bound by their nomadic existence to range through the woods, to prey upon the animal life, however successful they may be in the chase, tobacco, the goats and fowls, tempt their appetites to better their diet, and as they are crafty and cunning as foxes, they contrive to relieve their bigger neighbors of much store of food; and as they are strangers to moral principles, nothing but superior force can restrain them, and even then not without loss to be periodically repeated. The result is that they are endured as parasites of whom it is not easy to be relieved. Nature is so very bountiful, that when the plantations suffice to satisfy their wants, the neighborhood of the pigmies is no very great calamity; when they encroach upon other property not so easily replaced, a conflict is inevitable; but the pigmies are not despicable antagonists by any means. Without weapons a pigmy would have no chance against the strong-limbed, broad, full-chested planter; but with his little sheaf of poisoned arrows he is more than a match for a giant from the plantations equally armed. When the pigmy unhappily becomes a prisoner, he appears to be a puny being enough with his thin baby arms, narrow chest, pendulous abdomen, and short, withered legs, and excites nothing but ridicule from a tall Soudanese or well-built and sturdy Zanzibari; but in the evergreen glades, when met armed with his native courage, expertness, and weapons, many a rifleman has had to regret the encounter. How often have not my followers incurred my jeers for their stupidity in falling such easy victims to the pigmies’ well-aimed and straight shots. We were many months in the woods before the wooden-headed big fellows realized that they must use their eyes and ears and intelligence to protect themselves; that though they might be armed with the Maxim, they were as defenceless as children without wit!

I remember a scout, who was brave enough, plunging into the woods with a perfect breech-loader and well-filled cartridge-pouch to avenge an attack, returning within five minutes afterward with an arrow quivering between the fifth and sixth rib; another going to the brook to get water, powerfully armed, returning minus his rifle and pail, with a barbed arrow in his entrails; a woman going out to a plot at the extremity of a village to collect herbs for soup, rushing back with seven arrows standing out from her body; a Soudanese soldier, well-disciplined and with a good record, breaking fuel within sound of a camp containing four hundred rifles, returning to us with six arrows deeply fixed in his body. I could give fifty instances of such casualties, resulting from sheer blindness and folly. The pigmy never travels with his senses all asleep, as our men did. With his bow in one hand, a dozen deadly arrows in another, eyes open, ears on the alert, cautious step and bending body, wit guiding every movement, intelligence judging the result, he was a perfect contrast to the majority of our men, who strode through the wilds unconcerned, with consciousness steeped in lethal dulness, clogged ears, and unseeing eyes. If nothing crossed the view, our men were as unconscious as somnambulists. I have stalked them myself in the neighborhood of the camp, and twice became possessed of their arms, and covered them with their own rifles before they knew any person was near them. In sight of a village, or a hostile camp, or a surprised bivouac, they were well enough, but it was long before we could teach them to think, or experience could awake them to the realities of savage warfare.

Exaggerated as it may appear at first, I believe that the presence of a body of pigmies might, with a few months’ more practice, be detected by the olfactory nerves alone, as easily as the pungent track of a wart-hog might be traced by the nose. They effuse a particularly sharp, acrid odor, as different from that peculiar to the ordinary negro as the smell of the latter is from that of a white man.

How many ages have elapsed since these dwarfed human beings made their homes in this vast forest of Equatorial Africa, no one can say with any approach to certainty. We know that they were there before Herodotus visited Egypt, even before Homer recited his marvelous poems. We may venture to assert that they were not far off when Rameses, 1500 B.C., conquered upper Nubia—that is, thirty-five centuries ago. They might have remained buried in this gloomy region as many centuries yet, had not the railway and the press been invented. Without the former their fastnesses are unassailable, without the latter to inspire and arouse those who can construct the railway, it would be too costly and impracticable. The railway which is being laid to unite the lower with the upper Congo—and the growing flotilla of the Congo State —will enable the enterprising whites, with their following of armed men, rubber collectors, timber contractors and gum traders, agents of police and missionaries, to let light upon the trackless region. Though the pigmies are averse to light and sunshine, some will survive the great change, and in many a story of pioneering which will be written in the future, I have not the least doubt they will prove themselves to be very much like the rest of humanity, and quite as susceptible to the sentiments of love, affection, and gratitude as any of us.