The Benin massacre

Front matter

cp

CAPTAIN BOISRAGON MR. LOCKE

From a Photograph by Messrs. Elliott fy Fry

Contents

CHAP.

I. HISTORY OF BENIN .

II. THE ROYAL NIGER COMPANY AND COAST PROTECTORATE

Chapter I

BENIN seems to have been a kingdom from time immemorial, anyway from before its first discovery by the Portuguese, somewhere at the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century. By their discoveries, the Portuguese for a long time had all the benefits of the trade to be obtained from West Africa. They were followed some time after by the Dutch and Swedes. It was not till the year 1552 that the English began to visit these parts; and in 1588 Queen Elizabeth granted a charter to an African Company of English

Merchants, who thereupon started trading all over the West Coast of Africa, much to the annoyance of the Dutch and Portuguese.

The first English expedition to visit Benin City started in two ships and a pinnace from Bristol in 1553, under the command of two captains, Windham and Antonio Anes Pinteado. The latter, as his name indicates, was a Portuguese, and seems to have been a most excellent man as well as a skilled navigator. At one time he was in such favour with the King of Portugal that he was appointed to take care of the Coasts of Brazil and Guinea against the French, " to whom," as his old biographer * says, ' ' he was a terror in these seas. " This expedition never promised to be much of a success, as from the very first Captain Windham seems to have been " a terror to " the worthy Pinteado, and treated him infamously through the whole voyage, — amongst other things, threatening to cut off the ears of "this rascally Jew," as he called him, and nail them to the mast. They seem to have been about six months in arriving

1 One Richard Eden, who published a small collection of travels in 1577.

at the mouth of the Benin River, from whence they sent up the pinnace as near as they could get to Benin City. Here Captain Pinteado with an English gentleman called Nicholas Lambert and other merchants landed, and were conducted to the King's Court, ten leagues from the river. They seem to have had a most friendly reception from His Majesty, " a black moor or negro," who spoke to them in Portuguese, which he had learnt when a child. After discovering that they had come for purposes of trading, the King not only promised to fill their ships with pepper, which seems to have been the great article of trade at that time, but also, in case they had not enough merchandise to pay for the pepper, the King actually proposed to give them credit for it till next season, which, considering all things, seems to have been confiding in him.1 They were in Benin City for thirty days, but during this time their men, from drinking palm-wine

1 Richard Eden gives rather a quaint description of this pepper, which is nowjcalled chili or red pepper. He calls it "the grain or spice of the country, which is a very hot fruit, and much like figs."

and other causes, were dying at the rate of four and five a day. This made Captain Windham send to tell them to return at once ; but as they wished to wait longer till they had collected all their pepper, Windham sent them a second message to say that if they did not return at once he would sail away and leave them. Whereupon Pinteado returned with the intention of trying to persuade Captain Windham to stop.

Windham, however, before this, in his rage against Pinteado, had broken open the latter's cabin and spoiled all the "cordials and sweetmeats he had provided for his health," and taken away all his clothes. "After which strange procedure," Eden says, " he [Windham] fell sick and died." Pinteado also, after mourning for Windham as if he had been his dearest friend, and after having been still worse treated by the rest of the mariners and officers, fell sick and died likewise. Then this unfortunate expedition had to sink one of their ships for want of hands to navigate her, and eventually returned to England with scarcely forty out of the original 140 able-bodied men who had started in it. Poor Captain Pinteado must have been unlucky most of his life, for before leaving Portugal he seems to have suffered long imprisonment on a false charge. Amongst his papers was a quaint one, a Royal Patent appointing him one of the Knights of the Royal Household of Portugal, with a salary of ten shillings a month, and half a bushel of barley every day so long as he should keep a horse ; but with an injunction not to marry for six years, lest he might have children to succeed in this allowance.

After this, though there were several English expeditions to the Coast of Guinea, none seemed to have reached Benin until 1589, or over thirty years afterwards. In 1588, the charter I have spoken of was granted by Queen Elizabeth to certain merchants of Devon, to trade between the Rivers Senegal and Gambia, or, as they were called then, Senega and Gambra. At the end of 1588 two worthy merchants of London, Bird and Newton by name, fitted out another expedition to Benin, consisting of one ship of one hundred tons and a pinnace, under the chief command of a Captain James Welsh, who made two voyages in succession to these parts and wrote the account of them. This expedition of one ioo-ton ship and one pinnace seems rather small in these days, especially after the late Punitive Expedition, which consisted of two first-class cruisers of 1 2,000 tons, one second-class, three third-class, and three gunboats. Captain Welsh's expedition eventually left Plymouth on the 14th December 1588, and reached the mouth of the Benin River on the 14th February 1589. Here Anthony Ingram, the chief factor, and several of the others got into the pinnace and ship's boats and proceeded to Benin City. Gwatto, or, as they called it, Goto, seems to have been then, as now, the landing-place for Benin City, and there accordingly the party landed. They also seem to have been well treated by the reigning monarch, who promised them all the pepper, etc., they wanted. This was not the same king that received Captain Pinteado, for the present one stated that during his reign no Christians had traded for pepper in his country, consequently that there wasn't much ready, but that he would have plenty of it ready for them when they returned next year. This expedition also suffered badly from fever, losing many men, including the son of one of the owners of the ship, and the captain, Hempsteed. They got back again to Plymouth in September the same year.

Captain Welsh started off again in September the next year, 1590, with the same ship and under the same owners. This time they reached the mouth of the Benin River about the 15th January 1591, and the captain and merchants went up the river as before in the small boats. They got all their cargo on board and sailed away for England by the 28th April, reaching England only on the 13th December. Each time the cargo they brought back was much the same, — elephants' teeth, bags of pepper, and barrels of palm-oil ; while the " commodities " they took out are not so very dissimilar to those used in trade nowadays, namely,

1*

" broad cloth, kersies, bays [whatever they may be], linen cloth, unwrought iron, copper bracelets [called manillas, and used now by certain tribes in the Protectorate], coral [which is still much worn, and tremendously sought after by the chiefs and rich men of the Benin River], hawks' bells, horses' tails, hats, and the like."

In none of the accounts of these voyages is there any description of Benin City itself, but from a Dutch account written a few years later it appears to have been quite a magnificent city. The narrator talks of entering the city on horseback through a gate where there was a very thick high earthen bulwark, with a deep broad ditch, which, however, was dry and full of high trees. Later writers also speak of Benin City being surrounded by a high wall, but that seems to have disappeared long ago. The Dutch explorer quoted above, whose name, I believe, was Dantsic, also speaks of an enormous broad street running through the city, and other great streets running off it — so long that it was impossible to see to the end of them. He also gives a description of the King's Court, which seems to have been very grand, of the number of horses the King possessed (nowadays no Benin City man has ever seen a horse, or scarcely heard of one, as there are none anywhere near it). The King also had many soldiers, many gentlemen, many slaves, and many wives — only about six hundred ! Twice a year the King of those days went out of his Court and visited the town, accompanied by his six hundred wives. The gentlemen of Benin also had many wives — some eighty, some ninety, some more. These gentlemen seem to have been the aristocracy of Benin, and used to come to the Court riding on a horse, with a man on each side, to hold them on I suppose, and other slaves carrying big shields, to keep the sun off the gentlemen's heads, whilst yet more slaves made music for them, playing on drums, " homes and flints, — some have a hollow iron whereon they strike." As all this music came immediately after the gentleman on his horse, it is no wonder that he had to be held on his horse, or, as the narrative puts it, " having on each side a man, on whom they hold fast."

Even in those days, though sacrifices are not mentioned, the chief executioner seems to have been a most important personage.

After this, Benin City was visited frequently by explorers and traders of all nationalities. And though at first the Portuguese seem to have been the paramount European Power, their language and names being used for a long time by the Benin people, they seem to have gradually disappeared from Benin City in the same way as they left all their places on the Gold Coast and other parts of the Central West African coast-line. The Dutch seem to have succeeded them ; and a most interesting account of a visit to Benin City about the year 1700 by a Dutchman called David Van Nyendaeel is given by one William Bossman, a most worthy person, chief factor of the Dutch possessions in West Africa at that time, and the leading authority on that part of the world. Van Nyendaeel speaks in admiration of Benin City and its great long and broad

HISTORY OF BENIN u

streets, and also makes mention of human sacrifices. In his days the Benin men were great makers of ornamental brass-work, which they seem to have learned from the Portuguese. Amongst other notable travellers of later days who visited Benin City were Belzoni, the great Egyptian traveller, who died at Gwatto in 1823, and also Sir Richard Burton, who seems to have gone to every place in that part of the world that was worth seeing and at all hard to get at.1 Captain H. L. Gallwey, D.S.O., of the East Lancashire Regiment, who had been appointed Vice-Consul of the Benin River District, visited the city in 1892^ and from his

1 Sir Richard Burton, it appears, went up to Benin City with a missionary to try and put a stop to human sacrifices during the time that he was Consul at Fernando Po. In his time there was one horse in Benin City on which the King rode, being held on much after the manner of his ancestors. One chief was very disappointed at not getting a present of a carriage and pair of horses, which he was expecting daily as a present from the Queen of England. The missionary who was with Burton had taken up a small harmonium, and, by way of entertaining the King, Sir Richard Burton danced an Arabian dance before him, whilst the reverend gentleman played " We shall meet to part no more," on the harmonium. This, Burton says, was hardly appropriate, as his version would be, " We shall part to meet no more."

account Benin City was only the ruins of its former greatness ; no fine broad roads, nothing but collections of houses here and there.

Of course, in the slave- trading era, Benin City, like all the big towns in the Protectorate, was a great centre for obtaining slaves, and I believe that Captain Gallwey's party saw the remains of an old slave barracoon close outside the city. With the abolition of the slave trade one great source of wealth disappeared, and by the stupidity of the King in stopping all his people from trading every now and then, most of the others disappeared also, till the once great Benin City became what the Punitive Expedition found it, namely, a very large collection of scattered huts scarcely superior to any ordinary village of those parts. The country in itself is rich enough in trade produce, such as palm-oil, kernels, etc., and about ten years ago there were several factories on the Benin River doing an excellent trade with the Benin City Country, but in the last few years the amount of trade has dwindled down to almost nil, and now the different firms have built fresh

HISTORY OF BENIN r3

factories at Sapele, some fifty miles up the Benin River, at the junction of the Jamieson and Ethiope Rivers, where three-quarters of the trade of the Benin River District now goes to.

Another source of wealth to the King of Benin used to be the Benin Juju. Juju in this case meant a very powerful spirit or god that lived in Benin City, and was represented by the King. So powerful was it that until about three or four years ago some of the big chiefs close behind Lagos, who, one would have thought, were civilised enough to know better, used to send an annual subsidy or tribute on account of the Juju. The Benin River chiefs did the same, but their tribute was partly to induce the King to keep the trade open.

Then, again, the King was supposed to be very rich in ivory, as he received, or was supposed , to receive, one tusk of every elephant shot in his dominions ; but this ivory he seems to have stacked in his houses instead of selling. His slaves also, owing to the amount of wretched human sacrifices perpetrated every year, must have been an expensive item in his accounts.

H THE BENIN MASSACRE

Both slaves and ivory came from the Sobo and Abracca countries to the east of the Benin City Country proper, but which were part of the Benin Kingdom. It is to be hoped when the country has got settled down after the late expedition that the trade will revive again, for the country, as I have said, is rich in all kinds of produce, palm-oil, kernels, rubber, kola nut etc. etc., and I fancy the people will be only too willing to open up trade when they find they can do it for themselves, and without let or hindrance from the King of Benin and his Juju men. Of course this will take some time, for, being so absolutely steeped in superstition, and having had so little intercourse with white men, it will be hard to make the people realise that their all-powerful Juju is a thing of the past, and no longer has any power over them. By their old Juju they were forbidden to leave their country or to cross water, consequently no Benin men could ever get into canoes, and in the days of trade had to rely on the Jakris and Ejaws, the two great trading tribes of this district. These two tribes act as middlemen between the English merchants and the tribes dwelling farther inland, and from whose country the palm-oil and other trade-stuffs come, and are very anxious to prevent the two — the white man and the oil -producer — from meeting. However, as year by year the country is getting gradually opened up, the part of middleman will be done away with to a great extent, especially in the case of the Benin City Country.

Of the farther parts of the Benin Kingdom in the Sobo plains and Abracca country not much is known, as, by the King of Benin's orders, no white man has been allowed to go any distance away from the Ethiope River, on the right bank of which it lies. A great deal has been done in the last few years towards exploring and opening up the country on the left bank of the Ethiope, and beyond that again by the Protectorate officials, notably Captain Gallwey, Major Crawford, and Mr. Locke; and now the opening up of the country on the right bank is only a matter of time. I believe that it was somewhere in the direction of this country that the King of

Benin and his counsellors fled after the taking of Benin City by the Punitive Expedition. By this capture was ended the ancient kingdom of Benin ; and it is curious to think that a people who seem to have been more or less civilised in the sixteenth century, with a city that excited the admiration of all the Europeans of that date, should at the end of this nineteenth century have relapsed into a state of absolute savagedom, inferior to most of the peoples round them, whilst the wonderful city became a collection of half- ruined mud houses, not much better than the huts in an ordinary native village. The same has been the case with other West African kingdoms which have been once famous, such as Dahomey and Ashanti, the rulers of which, having been more or less spoiled by the deference and attention shown them by the various white men who have visited their countries, have gradually become "too big for their boots" ; and, imagining they were more powerful than any European nation, have by degrees and their conceited behaviour stopped the white men visiting them, and by so doing have become almost as pure savages as they were before their first contact with Europeans. Wherefrom anyone can deduce a moral to suit whatever his private opinion may be.

I was in Coomassie, the capital of Ashanti, for a short time in April 1892, in command of the escort of a small expedition under Captain J. I. Lang, R.E., who was British Commissioner for settling the western boundary of the Gold Coast with the French. We had expected to find a respectable town, but saw nothing but a collection of small villages, the huts of which were nearly all in a halfruinous condition. The huts that had been told off to us looked like sieves, and were altogether in a very tumble-down state. The King's palace was a good deal better, and he was building himself a palaver-house that was supposed to be something very grand, but after all it was nothing more than an extra large mud hut with the walls more carefully smoothed than usual. This king was of course King Prempeh, who was taken prisoner by our expedition in 1896. The only glory of

Coomassie was in the remains of the stone wall of the old palace, which was knocked down by our troops under Lord Wolseley in the war of 1875. Each of these stones had been brought from a distance of one hundred miles on the heads of natives, as there is no stone in the country, which made it of course extra valuable.

We certainly had a grand reception from some 12,000 to 14,000 men, and the King alone was a sight to see, being a mass of gold from a kind of fireman's helmet he had on to the tips of his sandals, which alone must have been worth some hundreds of pounds. Still, with all this reception there were no signs of any civilisation, and the Coomassies had relapsed into most of the usual customs of savages, which had at one time been stopped — particularly of human sacrifices, which led to the last expedition of 1896.

A peculiar thing happened during the latter part of this ceremony. The King, who at that time was a boy under twenty, I should think, and fat enough to have posed as a fat woman in a fair, condescended to dance before us, to the extreme and almost delirious joy of his people, who get such a treat but rarely. In this dance he went through various actions with a toy bow and arrow, a toy gun, and other things, which actions represented that he was the best shot in the world with a bow and arrow, a gun, the strongest man in the world, and so on. Suddenly a Mr. Vroon, now a C.M.G., and one of the District Commissioners of the Gold Coast, who was with us, and who knew more about the manners and customs of the Ashantis than most people, held up two fingers, upon which the King more or less collapsed. Mr. Vroon explained to us afterwards that the King had been doing something which meant that the Ashantis were the most powerful nation in the world ; the two fingers held up meant that England was more powerful, as shown in the '75 war, up to which date the Ashantis really believed that they could "lick creation." This '75 war had never been forgotten by either the Ashantis or by the many tribes released from their objectionable rule as the effects of that war ; so, naturally, the King collapsed.

However, I am afraid I have wandered some way from the kingdom of Benin.

Let its ashes rest in peace, so that there may be no more peaceful expeditions to it like our fatal one.

CHAPTER II THE ROYAL NIGER COMPANY AND H.B.M.'s NIGER COAST PROTECTORATE

THERE seems to be a good deal of confusion at home between the Royal Niger Company and the Niger Coast Protectorate, so some explanation may be acceptable. The Royal Niger Company, a chartered company, started about 1885 by buying out — or amalgamating in itself — all the different companies, English and foreign, then trading on the Lower Niger. In the next year, 1886, they obtained their charter, and also the right to administer the country from the Nun mouth of the Niger as far as a place called Say, which was supposed to be the boundary between the Company's and

French spheres of influence. Since then they have gone ahead rapidly, somewhat on the lines of the old East India Company, making treaties with all the big chiefs within their sphere, and by so doing stopping the advance of the French on the one side and the Germans on the other. Within their territory lie the great Hausa States, Sokoto, Gando, etc. These Hausa States are the result of a great Mohammedan invasion from the north some very long time ago, and the inhabitants are a very civilised race. They are all Mohammedans, and some of them can still write and read Arabic. The Hausas are supposed to be the best-fighting race in this part of the world, and the Niger Company's constabulary are recruited nearly entirely from them. The principal stations of the Company, all of them on the Niger itself, are Lokoja, at the junction of the Benue with the Niger, and the headquarters of the troops ; Asaba, the administrative headquarters ; and Akassa, at the mouth of the Great River, and which was the scene of the attack on the Niger Company by the natives from Brass in January 1895. The coast-line of the Company lies between the Forcados and Brass Rivers.

The Niger Coast Protectorate, formerly called the Oil Rivers Protectorate, lies between our own colony of Lagos on one side, and the German colony of the Cameroons on the other, with the exception of the bit I have mentioned as belonging to the Royal Niger Company. The Protectorate is one mass of rivers large and small, and creeks by the thousand break the coast-line. The principal big ones are the Benin River, the Forcados, Brass, — one of the many offshoots of the Niger, — New Calabar, and Bonny, which are virtually offshoots of the Niger also, as they come from the Oguta lake, which is connected with the Niger, Opobo, Qua, I bo, Cross, and Old Calabar Rivers. Between these are many small rivers useless for navigation, the mouths being too shallow to allow ships of any size to cross, and in addition for some thirty to forty miles inland the country is simply one network of creeks which join river to river. These creeks are more or less navigable for small steam-launches, so that it is very nearly possible to get from one end of the Protectorate to the other by water, land communication near the sea being practically nil.

The Protectorate of the Niger Coast was formally assumed in 1884, and was originally called the Oil Rivers Protectorate, from the fact of these rivers supplying the main part of the palm-oil exported from West Africa. At first it was administered by one consul, whose headquarters were at Old Calabar, and who had to do everything himself. In 1891 a proper Government was formed under an Imperial Commissioner, the first being Major (nowSirClaude) MacDonald, K.C.M.G., H.M.'s Minister at Peking. A vice-consul was placed in charge of all the important districts — Benin, Brass, Bonny, Opobo, and Old Calabar — with consular agents at those and other stations. A small force of soldiers was raised in 1891, 350 strong, afterwards raised to 450, whose headquarters are at Old Calabar, also the headquarters of the Government, with detachments at Sapele, Brass, and Degamah. The men are mostly Yorubas, with a fairsized minority of Hausas. Yorubas are supposed generally to be individually inferior to the Hausas in the way of pluck, but, personally, I don't think there is much difference ; and as a body of men I prefer the Yorubas, as they are steadier and more easily kept in hand, and consequently men better suited to the close bush-fighting of the country than the merry Hausa, who is apt to get a bit out of hand at close quarters and delights in charging in with his knife individually. From the large amount of country it is supposed to protect, and the number of different tribes to be dealt with, this small force sees a good deal of active service each year. Apart from numerous small expeditions, in one of which Captain Price, the late Commandant of the Force, was killed, it has taken part in conjunction with a Naval Brigade in three larger ones. The first against Nanna, the head chief of the Benin River, in 1894, m which it lost another officer, Captain Lawlor, R. M. L. I. ; the second against the Brass natives, who had attacked and looted the Royal Niger Company's station at Akassa ; and lastly in the late Punitive Expedition to Benin City, in which, being in front the whole time, they had most of the fighting, and in which, I am glad to say, Admiral Sir Harry Rawson, K.C.B., Colonel Bruce Hamilton, who commanded them, and everyone who saw them, spoke most highly of them. It is a most compact little force, too, possessing four 7-pounder field guns and three Maxims, one or other of which accompany every expedition. The 7 -pounders are most excellent guns, as they are made to stand any amount of knocking about, and also to be mounted and dismounted in a very short space of time. They are much disliked by the natives of the country, who call them "them gun that shoot twice," referring to the explosion of the shells, which they consider distinctly unfair, taking place as it does so far away from the gun, and mostly unpleasantly close to themselves, when they are, as they fondly imagine, out of range.1 Another thing they object to

1 The native has also his pet name for the Maxim : " Them guns that goes pop, pop, pop, pop," etc. I once sat a friendly chief down behind one to show him how simply the thing strongly is the war rocket, which they look on as an invention of the devil, and cannot understand how the wretched thing keeps on working its way through the thickest of forest, looking for them everywhere, as it were.

It is a peculiar country to deal with, the Protectorate, so far as its inhabitants are concerned, there being so many and various tribes with all their different languages and dialects. Thus a Jakri from the Benin River would be almost as much a stranger amongst the Old Calabar people as a white man. Then again, since King Jaja of Opobo was deported many years ago, and now that His Majesty of Benin has had to fly, there are no big chiefs by dealing with whom one could settle big tracts of country. It is a case of dealing with chief by chief, village by village, and it has often happened to officials trying to get through the country, exploring and opening it up, that though one village of a tribe might be most friendly and do everything in their

worked, and the old gentleman was so pleased that he wasted nearly five hundred rounds of our best ammunition before I could induce him to stop pressing the button.