INDIA-RUBBER.
[TO THE EDITOR 01 THE SPECTATOR7 SIR, —I have read, as I am sure' many West-Coasters will have read, with great interest your article in the Spectator of November 14th on india-rubber, and I should much like to ask the learned writer thereof if something might not be done to reinstate the rubber-vines in those West African districts where the wasteful way in which the natives have collected it has stamped the trade out, and whether this reinstating might not be effected by the judicious felling of timber at a slight expense, because, if done judiciously, the timber felled would be of valise and help to pay expenses. From what I have seen of the rich rubber districts of Western Africa the stamping-out of rubber in a district arises primarily from the native pulling down every rubber-vine he sees and cutting it up into small pieces with a view to putting those pieces round a fire and running the rubber into a calabash; 4, whenthe vines are too strong for him to do this, making murderous wounds on them with his machete; secondarily, it arises from the very trying habits of the Landolphia in insisting on starting life from a seed—it will not send out side branches if its top is cut off, and it will not send up shoots from its roots. Now in dense African forests the chances of seeds are few and far between. They fall upon the ground 150 ft. or 200 ft. below the region whereon the sunshine and the rain plays. You may go for months through the great Forest Belt of Africa in a grim twilight gloom, seeing nothing day out and day in but countless thousands of bare grey tree-stems festooned with great bush - ropes twined and twisted round each other and round the tree-columns, as bare of foliage as a ship's wire rigging, and looking like some Homeric battle- of serpents arrested at its height by a magic spell. If your way takes you on to a mountain-top and you look down on the country you have traversed you can hardly recognise it in the wild, luxuriant mass of beauty, redolent in colour and perfume, that stretches before you, the top of the forest ;. but if you keep on the level ground you will come now and again to an oasis of new life where one of the forest giants having grown above his fellows and so given the tornado a grip on him, has been destroyed. He has been cast by the tornado wind a wreck to rot, or turned in a second from a glorious living thing into a seared skeleton by the tornado's lightnings. If you will carefully examine such an oasis of new life, caused by the sunlight and rain reaching the ground instead of the top of the forest, you will see thousands of young plants coming up, and among the medley you will, I think I may say, always see young rubber-vines. A very few. of these vines will ultimately survive; only those, in fact, which by their wonderful hook-tackle arrangements have gripped on to the two or three saplings of great forest trees which are destined to win in the race for life with their neigh- bours, and take the place of the great fallen monarch tree and those round him which have been wrecked by his fall. Of course, to carry out clearings in West African forests means the institution of a Forestry Department like that of India, and this for trade purposes is not immediately required ; for the quantity of rubber in West Africa is enormous. The Kicksia, the Lagos rubber - tree that has been brought so profitably forward by Sir Alfred Maloney and Sir Gilbert Carter of Lagos. is by no means confined to Lagos. It grows in great luxuriance all along the South-West Coast ; but at pre- sent the African does not know it is a rubber-tree down there, and confines his attention to the vines, to Landolphia 0 wariensis, from which he gets the high quality rubber; to Lan- dolphia florida, from which he gets flake rubber; and to five other bush-ropes, from which he gets a sap which is not true rubber at all, but which he uses, with many other things, to- adulterate his rubber with, to the end of making it heavier,. because it is bought of him by weight, and it is his nature to adulterate everything that passes through his hands. A Forestry Department is, however, a great need in those por. tions of the West African Coast that fringe the Western Soudan, like the Gold, Ivory, and Slave Coasts. The forests here are only fringing forests between the Sea of Sand, the Sahara,. and the Salt Sea, or the Bight of Benin, and are in danger of being destroyed by the native, in his terribly destructive way of making his farm,—clearing a patch of bush, cultivating it for- a season, then letting it go into a worthless jungle; and clearing another patch. Such disforested regions you will find round Accra and the Elmina Plain; and in those regions of this disforested land most remote from the Forest it is almost impossible now for the native to make a plantation whose yield is sufficient for his needs, beCause the destruction of the forests diminishes the rainfall,—for example, the rain- fall at Accra is about forty-five inches per annum, and this is not sufficient to support a luxurious food-producing vegetation in a tropical district subjected to a long dry season and the intensely drying action of the wind from the Sahara, and if the destruction of the forests is allowed to go on at its present rate for a few more years, we shall find ourselves facing famine in West Africa. The South-West Coast, which commences at Cameroon, is under different climatic conditions. Cameroons, with its volcanic island series of Fernando Po, San Thome, and Principe, has an infinitely richer soil and a heavy and evenly-distributed rainfall ; below Cameroons you are in the region of double seasons, two
wet and two dry, until you reach Congo ; and in this double- season region the growth of vegetation is so rapid that the native has to fight back the forest as a Dutchman fights the sea, and moreover the mass of the South-West Coast natives are not so much dependent on plantations as those of the West Coast, for they are nomadic hunters. I see you notice the German efforts to improve the producing power of Cameroons, and I should like to add that the French Govern. meat in Congo Francaise are equally active, and among other things have encouraged the planting of the pars-rubber tree, which flourishes exceedingly.—I am, Sir, Ac.,
Previous page
