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Updated: May 29, 2025
Perhaps the Nimrod of Mbata is just a little henpecked the Mpongwe mostly are and I soon found out that soigner les femmes is the royal road to getting on with the men. He supplies the village with "beef," here meaning not the roast of Old England, but any meat, from a field-rat to a hippopotamus.
The people have never invented any form of alphabet, yet the abundance of tale, legend, and proverb which their dialect contains might repay the trouble of acquiring it. To Sanga-Tanga and Back. My objects in visiting Mbata, the reader will have understood, were to shoot a specimen or specimens of the gorilla, and, if possible, to buy or catch a youngster.
We reached Mbata at 6.15 P.M., and all agreed that two hours of such forest-walking do more damage than five days along the sands. Since my departure from the coast, French naval officers, travellers and traders, have not been idle. He made observations amongst the "Kamma" tribe, which differs from the Bakele and other neighbours.
There is a great demand for beads and salt, the latter especially throughout the interior. Thus ended my "first impressions" amongst the Fan cannibals. Not yet despairing of a shot at or of capturing a "poor relation," I persuaded Mr. Tippet to assemble the lieges and offer them double what was proposed at Mbata.
It promised sand-flies, the prime pest of this region; a tall amphitheatre of trees on a dune to the west excluded the sea- breeze, and northwards a swampy hollow was a fine breeding place for M. Maringouin. Nche Mpolo lies some three miles nearly due south of Mbata; the single street contains fourteen cottages and two palaver houses.
Nimrod, however, declared that some bushmen had lately seen several gorillas in the direction of Sanga-Tanga, two marches down coast from Mbata, and about half-way to Cape Lopez. I did not believe a word of his intelligence; the direction is south-west instead of south-east, towards the sea instead of into the forest.
Then doubling a point of leek-green grass, based upon comparatively poor soil, sand, and clay, and backed by noble trees, we entered the Mbata River, the Toutiay of the chart and the Batta Creek of M. du Chaillu's map. It comes from the south-west, and it heads much nearer the coast than is shown on paper.
In the afternoon Selim went to fetch my arsenical soap from Mbata, where I had left it en Fitiche: as long as that "bad medicine" was within Hotaloya's "ben," no one would dare to meddle with my goods. Forteune walked in very tired about sunset. He had now added streaks of red to the white chalk upon his face, arms, and breast, for he suspected, we were assured, witchcraft.
On the next day another "gorilla palaver," when a large male was reported to have been shot without a shadow of truth, detained me: it was the last straw which broke the patient camel's back. After "dashing" to old King Langobomo one cloth, one bottle of absinthe, two heads of tobacco, and a clay pipe, we set out betimes for the fifteen miles' walk to Mbata.
Though we were approaching the sub-ranges of the Sierra del Crystal, the country was very like that about Mbata; streamlets flowing to the Mbokwe, wet yellow soil forming slippery muds, unhealthy as unpleasant in the morning sunshine; old and new clearings and plantations, mostly of bananas, mere spots in the wide expanse of bush, and deserted or half-inhabited villages.
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