THE PIRATES OF THE CONGO.
WE do not understand the kind of doubt professed by some of our contemporaries as to the morality of our recent operations in the Congo. They were not grand opera- tions, of course though they involved great hazard to life, being rather raids for police purposes than warlike expeditions, but they surely were a great deal more moral than the majority of battles fought for any purpose other than direct self-defence. They were directed in the world's interest against gangs of villains each one of whom deserved death. The debouchure of the Congo, like the debouchure of most first-class rivers in Africa and Asia, is full of small but fertile islets, separated by creeks overgrown with the luxuriant and noxious vege- tation of the tropics, till the scene looks at a little
distance like one impenetrable and deadly jungle. On these islets hundreds of negro desperadoes find refuge, and while their wives grow bananas and Indian corn, occupy themselves in plundering and killing unsuspecting traders. Always ready, always armed, knowing their creeks as cabmen know the streets of London, and brave enough to risk life when they are sure of victory, they attack every ship, or cargo-boat, or ship's boat of which their spies bring them intelligence, murder the crew, and carry off all the goods they can discover, to be sold,—sometimes, we fear, to the very traders who imported them, and who are afraid by denouncing the pirates to incur the risks of a savage vendetta. Such pirates used to swarm on every Asiatic coast, in every river, and in any port where they could build a watch-tower, and apart from the fact that they are habitual thieves, man- stealers, and murderers, they rank among the deadliest enemies with whom civilisation has to contend. Nothing can grow in their neighbourhood, any more than in the neighbourhood of African slave-hunters. No city can grow rich, no village on the coast be quiet, no trade spring up, till they are swept away ; and the task is so dangerous, that it falls almost of necessity to some maritime Power which happens to be strong as well as civilised. Natives cannot perform it, for the pirates beat them, as in Borneo, and on the Western coast of India pirates founded a State, and have repeatedly beaten anybody but the white men. Little States cannot perform it, for the expenses weary them out, as we see in the far Eastern Archipelago, where piracy and the Dutch used to flourish side by side. It is one of the greatest claims by England on the respect of mankind that she has undertaken practically the whole of this duty of arrest- ing the garotters of the seas, and has so performed it that, except in a few remote corners of Africa and Polynesia, and at intervals in the China seas, piracy has become so unknown that Englishmen have forgotten what pirates are, and are half doubtful whether, when they are shot or fined, they do not receive hard measure. Certainly, if any criminals in the world deserve death, they do ; and if part of the penalty falls on their wives and children, that is the arrangement of Providence, and not of man. If John is im- prisoned for sheep-stealing, even in merciful England, half the suffering, and sometimes a good deal more, falls on Jane and Jenny. It is impossible to let garotters go about because if they are arrested their wives may starve, and just as impossible to spare pirates because in giving them their punishment the innocent may be placed upon half-rations. If we do, we shall in a few years see pirates everywhere as dangerous, as well organised, and as insolent as the Barbary Corsairs were, till Lord Exmouth put an end to their mimes, by a cannonade in which, we greatly fear, a great many women and children also perished. If the pirates were in the Mersey instead of the Congo, we should hear no doubts as to the righteousness of bringing them
to a sense of their ways by the readiest and roughest means, and nothing seems to have distinguished the pirates of the Congo from others of their fraternity except the difficulty of getting at them. This was nearly insuperable. A pirate village on an African river can be reached only by pulling an open boat with a crew of armed men, it may be for miles, through a creek as pestilential as a cesspool, under a roof of foliage which may touch the rowers' heads, and between trees every one of which may shelter a musketeer. If the men remain in the boats, they die of malaria. If they land and scatter, they are mur- dered one by one. If they hold together, they have to march, amidst terrible heat, in single file, through bull-grass, so high and thick as to baffle sight and almost keep out air, and are potted at on disembarkation and embarkation, while cooking and when sleeping; in fact, whenever a savage with a musket, irritated to madness, can get a chance of a deadly shot without being instantly put to death. So numerous and so appalling to the imagination are the risks involved, that an expedition in boats for hunting pirates requires volunteers like a forlorn hope, that the very best officers have constantly to be selected to command, with an indefinite increase to the risk of loss, and that two or three nations, one in particular, prefer most disgraceful compromises to the effort to perform such duty. They buy toleration by black-mail in money and information. It is thoroughly to Commodore Hewett's credit, that the Geraldine,' a British schooner, having been attacked, he resolved tO perform a nasty but necessary duty, bringing him nothing except the chance of losing his best men by malaria, or "slugs," pieces of lead which make a much worse wound if fired close enough than a Minie-bullet. The expedition appears to have been carried out with equal forethought, daring, and success. The boats, fourteen or fifteen in number, were fitted up on the spur of the moment like ironclad,s, sheets of iron, rising two-and-a-half feet above the gunwales, being nailed to their sides, so that the men could avoid the fire of hidden enemies. The sailors were dosed with quinine, and the commanding officer was a man who, when his boat was literally stopped in a creek by the overhanging forest and creepers, could jump into the water, call on the men to follow him, and so wade through the slimy cess- pool, under the drooping trees, almost in darkness, for half a mile, into what was virtually a cave, with its sides lined by enemies with muskets in their hands,--enemies who were covered by the trees, and who could, at a moment's notice, dodge off out of danger into the impenetrable forest. Let us hope Captain Bradshaw is an unimaginative man. If he is not, a more splendidly brave act never was performed in our naval history. For eight mortal days this kind of work went, on, the big guns in the boats keeping up a heavy preventive fire on the banks, which may have killed hundreds and may have killed none, but which. stopped for long intervals the rain of slugs which otherwise, in spite of the impromptu armour-plating, inight have thinned down the crews till a rush became possible, and the men now and then landing and marching through the tall grass upon some pirate village,which was burnt. The pirates adhered to the regular tactics of their kind in Africa, and fired when they had a chance, but for the most part trusted to the inability of the Europeans to penetrate the jungle, and but that their settlements are fixed near the creeks, would have been triumphant. They are, however, so fixed, and the expedition burnt sixty-seven villages, and destroyed all their fruit-tree plantations,—that is to say, inflicted in the only way possible a fine sufficient to make the pirates feel that piracy is not a profitable trade. That argument comes home to men on whom a great deal of sympathy is wasted. They are simply villains, who could live at home on their pro- duce, if they chose, but who prefer to make occasional robbery and murder excuses for leading at other times
lives of animal laziness and enjoyment. They are not East-Indian frontier men, or West-Indian maroons, or even European brigands, but utter villains, who would rather murder for nothing than not murder, who break every compact made with them, and who can be tamed at first only by one argu- ment,—fear of the consequences of indulging their love for plunder. They do not actually starve, for the jungle itself, the fish, the birds, and the berries, which no man can injure, will support them when their villages are destroyed ; but they do lead unpleasant lives, do have to search for a living, and do have to eat unpleasing things, just as European prisoners have, and have all the while what European prisoners have not,—full per- mission to escape all those disagreeables whenever they like by C • -Naming to the mainland and leaving piracy alone. It may be arged that the suffering is useless, as the Europeans once away, they will go on plundering as before ; but the experience of two centuries proves that this is not the case ; that piracy, except when tolerably safe, is not an attractive trade ; and that whenever the European is firm, pirates as tenacious as brave, and as adventurous as the Malays will give up their hereditary pursuit. The best proof of this fact is that armed vessels are seldom attacked, and that Sir William Hewett advises that every trader who enters the river should be armed. Pirates dislike being shot, just as burglars do, and an expedition, if well managed, is just as effective as the Assizes for which it is the bad, but unavoidable sub- stitute. This particular expedition was a bit of police-work, executed with rare nerve, and as it will probably prove, with such complete success, that the pirates will have, like the people of the mainland, to take to cultivation. That is a good result, even for the "king" who had plundered so much that his "palace" struck awe into the native mind, and actually con- tained eight rooms. That it was destroyed was a loss to Africa, may be, but the alternatives lay between destroying some wooden rooms and hanging their owner, and if the alternative selected was the feebler, it was certainly not the more merciless.
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