TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA

INTRODUCTION

It was in 1893 that, for the first time in my life, I found myself with five or six months that were not already spoken for. Feeling like a boy with a brand-new coin, I "lay about in my mind"—as Mr. Bunyan John Bunyan (1628–1688), author of The Pilgrim's Progress. would say—considering what to do with them. "Go and learn about the tropics," said Science. I wondered where on earth I should go, for the tropics are the tropics wherever they are found; so I took down an atlas and saw that either South America or West Africa must be my destination, as the Malayan region was too far away and too expensive. Then I obtained Wallace’s Geographical Distribution Alfred Russel Wallace's The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876), a foundational work in biogeography. and, after reading that master’s article on the Ethiopian region A historical biogeographical term for the area of Africa south of the Sahara Desert., I steeled my resolve and settled on West Africa.

I did this all the more readily because, while I knew nothing of the actual conditions there, I knew a great deal by both tradition and report about Southeast America. I remembered that Yellow Jack A common historical nickname for yellow fever, referring to the yellow flag flown by quarantined ships. was endemic there, and that a certain naturalist—my superior both physically and mentally—had come very close to starving to death in the depressing company of an expedition slowly perishing from want and various fevers up the Paraná River.

My ignorance regarding West Africa was soon corrected. And although the vast void in my mind that it occupied—