BOOKS.

ALONE IN WEST AFRICA.*

'Tars is an interesting and attractive book written by an Australian lady of unbounded enterprise, already known as a skilled and picturesque writer. Mrs. Gaunt visited the ,Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, went to nearly every station on the Gold Coast, travelled inland up the Volta and across into German territory, and as far as Odumase, in the Ashanti Hinterland. Her book, which is well illustrated by her own photographs and much helped by a rough sketch map, con- tains graphic description, shrewd observation, and outspoken criticism.

The first feature which calls attention is the personal cour- age of the writer, which took her into places singularly ill suited for wandering white ladies, and where, it must be ,added, she cannot have gone without causing a considerable measure of anxiety and inconvenience to others. Her courage is illustrated by her own confessions of fear on several occa- sions, as when, on her way from the Volta to Togoland, she • Atone in West Africa. By Mary Gaunt. London: T. Werner Laurie. (150. net.]

passed a night alone in the resthouse on Annul mountain. " What I feared I know not, but I feared, feared greatly. . . . I could hear the drip, drip as of water falling somewhere in the silence ; I could hear the cry of a bird out in the hush ; but it was the silence that made every rustle so fraught with meaning. It was no good telling myself there was nothing to

fear " (pp. 228-9). And, again, in another resthouse in the forest behind Kumasi : "I was afraid of something intangible, born of the weird stillness and the gloom" (p. 363). Men and

women who are really cowards do not like to talk about it, and, if they do, are much more reserved than Mrs. Gaunt.

Her courage was accompanied by, was probably in large measure the result of, excellent health. She seems to have spent over eight months on her trip, though there is an absence of dates in the narrative ; she went freely into heat and rain and among the most unhealthy surroundings, yet she tells us that she went to West Africa ill "and came away in the rudest health" (p. 3B9). This she attributes to acting upon

the principle "that to ensure good health in West Africa you must have plenty of fresh air " (p. 183).

In addition to her personal pluck, her good health, and her Australian readiness to rough it, Mrs. Gaunt brotight to her West African visit at once strong sympathy with .the genius loci and an eye for, coupled with ability to depict, natural scenery. She went with infinite labour all along the Gold Coast, bearing in mind that its name implies what it was in history—a coast upon which Europeans of various nations con- structed forts and factories at this point and at that, sometimes

side by side, as at Accra, where in old days English, Dutch, and Danes all had forte. These forts on the Gold Coast had a singular attraction for her. She tells us that her publisher "commissioned a book about the wonderful old forts that I knew lay neglected and crumbling to decay all along the shores of the Gold Coast" (p. 8) : one of the chapters is headed "In the Paths of the Men of Old "; and of Elmina she writes : "If I

were to describe the magnificent old castle, I should fill half the book ; it is so well worth writing about" (p. 151). It is to be hoped that the pages of Alone in West Africa will call atten- tion to these landmarks of a curious and interesting past, and lead to their upkeep as ancient monuments. If she can write about forts, she can also describe tropical scenery. Here Is an appreciation of the Volta River : " Sometimes its great, wide, quiet roaches are like still, deep lakes, in whose clear surface is mirrored the calm, blue sky, the fleecy clouds, the verdure-clad banks, and the hills that are clothed in the densest green to their very peaks. Sometimes it is a raging torrent, fighting its way over the rocks, and beneath the vivid blue sky is the gorgeous vegetation of the tropics, tangled, luxuriant, feathery palms, tall and shapely silk-cotton trees bound together with twining creeper, and trailing vine in one iMpenetrable mass" (pp. 214-15).

And here is the impression produced upon her by the Ashanti forest :— " There was not much to see, but yet the eternal trees had a most wonderful charm. It was like being in some lofty cathedral where the very air was pulsating with the thought of great and unseen things beyond the comprehension of the puny mortals who dared rashly to venture within the precincts" (p. 3131), In these days, when there is unfortunately no great love lost between English and Germane, it is pleasant to note bow warmly Mrs. Gaunt writes of the personal kindness which she received from the Germans in Togoland. She is, moreover, a great admirer of German work and German methods in West Africa, some of her comments _being very apt. As the guest of a German trader and his wife at Saltponds, on the Gold Coast, she " began to realize for the first time tliot efficiency in little things which is going to carry the Germans so far" (p. 166), and her reflection on crossing from a forest track in British territory to a fine road in Togoland is : " The Germans

make roads as the Romans made them, that their conquering legions might pass " (p. 242).

But, when she writes on*" German versus English methods," it is necessary to bear in mind that the writer is an Australian. Indeed, the interest of the book largely consists in West Africa being described from an Australian point of view, -the point of view of the young members of the British family, when taking stock of and sitting in friendly judgment upon the parents' work. It is in all senses an open-air point of view, fresh, healthy, virile (even when it is a woman's), seeing weak points and sometimes making good ones, but, on the other band, rough and ready, over-confident from want of adequate knowledge and training, a point of view which does hot sufficiently reckon with what the past has left as a legacy, or with the complications caused on the one band by public opinion in an old and staid community and on the other by the divided attention which a world-wide Empire implies. Thus the " thorough German methods" appeal to Mrs. Gaunt, and it is well that they should be appreciated and that their merits should be pointed out. But the untidy Gold Coast is one among many tropical dependencies of England. Its well-kept neighbour, Togoland, is one of a few tropical dependencies upon which Germany can concentrate her great resources and her singular power of organization. Togoland has little coast and much hinterland ; and when Mrs. Gaunt went into British Hinterland in Ashanti she came to the conclusion that the English, as administrators, can at least compare with the Germans. But the Gold Coast in the past was coast and not hinterland, and it came to England seared with white as well as black barbarism. The white barbarism was not all of England's own making, for other nations also were planted on the coast and had a hand in the slave trade. This past has con- tributed to the present in the coast regions of West Africa, and has still more contributed to the views, whether right or wrong, which are held in England about West Africa, to tenderness for Mission work, and to distrust of the " thorough " methods which appeal to Mrs. Gaunt. There may be solid foundation for her views, and we may well have much to learn from our French and German neighbours and rivals in Africa, but present conditions must be interpreted through the past.

"During all my gay in German territory," Mrs. Gaunt writes, " I never slept under a mosquito curtain, and I never saw that abomination, a mosquito-proof room. The Germans evidently think it easier to do away with the mosquito" (p. 256) ; and she records her "firm belief that no inconsiderable number of lives in Africa must be lost owing to some doctor's prejudice in favour of mosquito-proof netting " (p.18). This, again, illus- trates somewhat literally what has been termed above the young, open-air view. Surely it may be assumed that English are as much alive as Germans to the desirability of eliminating the mosquito as far as it is possible to do so, and that where it may not be possible under present conditions at our innumerable out-stations, the great scientific men who have given and are giving their lives to combating malaria, and who have proved to demonstration that the conductor of malaria is the anopheles mosquito, know what they are about in prescribing mosquito netting.

In her comparison of English, Australian, and German women, and her insistence that West Africa should not be so constantly decried as a dwelling-place, and might be made more of a home and less of a scene of exile, by encour- aging English wives to go out and live with their husbands,

Mrs. Gaunt writes what is well worth attention. Here, again, we have, and have at its best, the Australian point of view that hardness and loneliness May be cheerfully endured in doing constructive work for the nation. She writes in the spirit of the " 'Women of the West," who are building up Australia. " Every woman who goes and stays makes it easier for the woman who follows in her footsteps" (p. 390). Her criticisms, too, on the constant changes of officers from one station to another have considerable force. But on all these points she writes as though what has occurred to her cannot have occurred to those who have been administering or trading with West Africa all these years, and who have at their disposal an unrivalled store of West African experience. When we read that " finally, West Africa is the country of raw material. It should be England's duty so to work that country that it be complementary to England, the great manufacturing land" (p. 397), we are almost forced to the conclusion that Liverpool merchants have never existed and that West Africa has now been discovered for the first time.

But this quotation does not show Mrs. Gaunt at her best. She is at her best in vivid description ; and whether she is desCribing Liberia, " Where the black man rules"; or the " Ground Nut Colony," as she styles time Gambia ; or the Gold Coast or Togoland, she sees keenly what is before her eye's, and has the gift of making it in a singular degree Clear and

picturesque to her readers. It is good, too, to read a book by one who has come back from West Africa with love for West Africa in her heart, who has found there " a lovely land, an entrancingly lovely land in places" (p. 11).