SOURCE: McEwan, Cheryl. “Paradise or Pandemonium?” In Gender, Geography and Empire: Victorian Women Travellers in West Africa, pp. 65-90. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000.

[In the following essay, McEwan analyzes the response of British female travel writers to the West African landscape, arguing that while their descriptions of the physical environment were complex and varied, they generally saw the natural environment as ordered and not chaotic and resisted the urge to establish control over the land they depicted.]

A wonderful stillness pervades these West African creeks. Except for the gentle ripple of the water among the mangroves, hardly a sound was to be heard, and the only sign of life was afforded by an occasional crane, which, startled by the sound of oars, reluctantly abandoned his fishing and flew heavily away.

(Colvile, 1893, 314)

[We] set out on our river journey, under a full moon, threading our way along one of the labyrinths of creeks—a liquid silver path, walled on each side with straight lines of mangroves, dense black shadows, and weird, bare white roots and stems—a scene suggestive of mystery, and full of a strange beauty of its own.

(Larymore, 1908, 5)

The West Coast of Africa is like the Arctic regions in one particular, and that is that when you have once visited it you want to go back there again; and now I come to think of it, there is another particular in which it is like them, and that is the chances you have of returning from it at all are small, for it is a Belle Dame sans merci.

(Kingsley, 1982, 11)

INTRODUCTION: BRITISH WOMEN TRAVELLERS IN WEST AFRICAN LANDSCAPES

Landscape description was a subject to which women travellers chose to devote extensive passages. Textual constraints on the production and reception of the text may have influenced the construction of copious descriptions of the physical environment in the narratives of Victorian women travellers, but at the same time there was a certain amount of self-determination on the content of their narratives. The fact that Kingsley was able to enter into scientific and political debate suggests that, even if these textual constraints had not existed, many women travel writers would still have avoided more robust and modern, and by implication more directly political and, therefore, feminist forms of writing. What becomes important, therefore, is a recognition of the constraints on the production and reception of the texts, but also the significance of differences between white women travellers, based on personality and experience, and the ways in which these differences produced variations in their landscape descriptions.

The conventions of the time exercised some influence on the language employed in landscape descriptions by women travellers. For the most part, they did not employ in these descriptions the sexual metaphors often found in travel accounts by men at this time;¹ the language of penetration, conquest and domination was a language generally not employed by women, although not exclusive of them. Instead they ‘attempted to combine the excitement of the unpredictable attaching to exploration’ with ‘the pleasure of knowing where one is’ (Fussell, 1977, 39). From their narratives it is clear that white women travellers considered themselves observers and describers of the physical environment, rather than conquistadors and doing battle with their surroundings in an effort to establish dominion over them. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, the very acts of observing and describing have implications for the relative positions of authority attained by white women abroad; observation and description were also means of mastering and appropriating the landscapes of west Africa. Landscape descriptions in the travelogues of British women give an indication of the varying levels of their attachment to and involvement in west Africa, and the different ways in which these women related to the physical environments they described. There is a stark contrast between the women of this study. On the one hand, Melville, Foote, Larymore and Colvile placed themselves outside the physical environments they observed and on which they commented. On the other hand, Slessor and Kingsley positioned themselves very much within the landscapes they described. While the latter travelled into the interior of west Africa, the former were to some extent geographically removed from west African environments. Landscape descriptions in the narratives of Foote and Colvile were drawn mainly from their observation from the sea in the course of their travels around the coast, and both Melville and Foote lived in coastal towns (Freetown and Lagos respectively), rarely travelling inland. In the narratives of these women there is a strong sense of their externality to the landscapes they described; they did not appear to have felt comfortable in west Africa and seem not to have identified with the landscapes they encountered. West Africa was perceived as Other. …

CONFRONTING ‘CHAOTIC’ WEST AFRICA

The ‘quest’ genre of travel writing featured prominently in the works of nineteenth-century explorers, and within these narratives there was a common style of landscape description. As Hammond and Jablow (1977, 61) argue, ‘though florid in style, the descriptions are matter-of-fact and more analytical than romantic’, for many explorers the landscape was incidental to their exploits and provided only a backdrop for their adventures. Thus landscape descriptions were most eloquent when evoking the hazards and threats facing the explorer. For the explorers of west Africa, the image of the ‘dark continent’ was often used as the backdrop for the heroic deeds of the protagonist. The dangers and uncertainties facing the explorer meant that the physical environment was often depicted as a pandemonium lacking order and familiarity. It has been asserted that women travellers in west Africa were denied access to the ‘quest’ genre of travel writing, and, as a result, their relationship with their physical environment tended on the whole to be more harmonious and non-confrontational. As a consequence of this, their landscape descriptions offer up several challenges to notions of ‘chaotic’ west African environments.

A major feature of landscape descriptions by white women travellers in west Africa was their recognition of order in the natural environment, and this is particularly evident in the narratives of Mary Kingsley. For Kingsley, west Africa was not a homogeneous confusion of nature, but a series of ordered physical environments—coastal, riverine, montane and forest environments—each presenting its own hardships, but all dramatic in their beauty. In Kingsley's mind, the horizontal bands of colour in the landscape when viewed on approach from the sea—the blue of the ocean, the white of the surf upon the yellow of the sand, the brown and green of the mangroves, the deep green of the rainforest, and in the distance the purple of the mountains, were evidence of natural order rather than of pandemonium. Other women travellers remarked upon these bands of colour, which formed their first impressions of west Africa from the Atlantic, and, although bereft of the poeticism of Kingsley's descriptions, still conveyed the impression of order. Colvile noticed the ‘long low line of palms, the strip of sand, and the fringe of breakers which are characteristic of this part of the African coast’ (1893, 285); Larymore described the ‘sunshine, sapphire water, the fringe of low grey coast-line … [T]he huge swell swept shorewards, to break in its thundering surf, away by the grey palm-trees and the yellow sand’ (1908, 4). The common perception was one of order and beauty rather than chaos. The layers of colour occur several times in Kingsley's descriptions, and even when she was in the rainforest she was able to recognize harmony in her surroundings. She wrote:

[O]n either side there … [are] banks of varied tropical shrubs and ferns, behind which rise, 100-200 feet high, walls of grand forest; … behind this again are the lovely foothills of Mungo, high up against the sky, coloured the most perfect, dark, lambent blue. The whole scheme of colour is indescribably rich and full in tone; the very earth under foot is a velvety-red brown, and the butterflies that abound show themselves off in the sunlight with their canary coloured, crimson, and peacock-blue liveries to perfection.

(1896c, 40)

Kingsley intimated that she felt more comfortable in west Africa than she did back in the crowds and traffic of London, and once back in England she yearned to return to west Africa. She wrote:

The charm of West Africa is a painful one. It gives you pleasure to fall under it when you are out there, but when you are back here, it gives you pain, by calling you. It sends up before your eyes a vision of a wall of dancing, white, rainbow-gemmed surf playing on a shore of yellow sand before an audience of stately cocoa palms, or of a great mangrove-walled bronze river, or of a vast forest cathedral, and you hear, nearer to you than the voices of the people around you, nearer than the roar of the city traffic, the sound of that surf that is beating on the shore down there, and the sound of the wind talking in the hard palm-leaves … and everything that is round you grows thin in the face of that vision, and you want to go back to that coast that is calling you, saying, as the African says to the departing soul of his dying friend, ‘Come back, this is your home.’

(1898c, 280)

It seems that it was her perception of the natural order and organization of the physical environment that Kingsley found most alluring about west Africa, and it could thus be argued that she employed a scientific, ecological ‘trope’ in her landscape descriptions (this is discussed in more detail subsequently). This can be observed in her descriptions of Corisco Island, off the coast of Angola. For Kingsley, Corisco Island was not only very beautiful, but was also an exquisitely ordered physical environment. She wrote:

I have heard much of the strange variety of scenery to be found on this island: how it has, in a miniature way, rivers, lakes, forests, prairies, swamps and mountains, and our walk demonstrates to me the baldness of the truth of the statement … [Leaving the beach] we clamber up the bank and turn inland, still ankle deep in sand, and go through this museum of physical geography. First, a specimen of grassland, then along a lane of thickly pleached bush, then down into a wood with a little (at present) nearly dried up swamp in its recesses; then up out onto an open heath which has recently been burnt and is covered with dead bracken and scorched oil palms … There is such an elaborate completeness about this museum, and we have not even commenced the glacier or river departments.

(1982, 385-6)

Similar descriptions are found in the narratives of other women travellers. Although Melville's landscape descriptions frequently alluded to ‘wilderness’, and she sometimes found the physical environment of west Africa threatening, she portrayed the landscapes around Sierra Leone as inherently harmonious. She wrote:

There are three distinct phases of landscape here. The first is hill and dale, clothed in all their original exuberance of stately forest, and appearing in their primeval grandeur, as it were, fresh from the hands of their Maker; the second is the first denuded and laid waste by fire and hatchet … and that is the scenery I would gladly see changed; the third is the second rich in partial cultivation, and which, with the first, constitutes the peculiar beauty of the tropics, and in it I certainly desire no variety.

(1968, 225)

Melville perceived those landscapes that remained in their natural state, and those that were only partially cultivated, as the most aesthetically pleasing; those landscapes which remained untouched, or ‘wildernesses’, were equally ordered as those under cultivation. Larymore was assured by a friend that ‘Nigeria was just like Accra—not a tree, not a blade of grass anywhere!’ to which she responded, ‘I have often smiled to myself over that pithy saying, while marching through magnificent forests, and miles of open, grassy, park-like country!’ (1908, 2). Larymore used the adjective ‘park-like’ on several occasions to describe the landscapes of Nigeria, which suggests that she also perceived these landscapes as inherently ordered.

Women travellers further dispelled the myth of pandemonium by attempting to familiarise their readers with unfamiliar landscapes. These attempts to ‘domesticate’ west African wildernesses were by no means exclusive to women writers, but it is a theme that seems to run through many of the narratives by women travellers in west Africa. They alluded to familiar aspects of western art and literature in creating their imagery. For example, Kingsley wrote of the scenery of the forest of the Ogowé, ‘It is as full of life and beauty as any symphony Beethoven ever wrote; the parts changing, interweaving and returning’ (in Howard, 1957, 86). Her publications and lectures abounded with such descriptions of the forest, ‘a vast, seemingly limitless cathedral with its countless columns covered, nay, composed of the most exquisite dark-green, large-fronded moss, with here and there a delicate fern embedded in it as an extra decoration’ (1982, 570). In these forests climbing plants became ‘coverlets’ spread over the trees to keep them dry; bush-ropes and lianas became ‘some Homeric battle of serpents that at its height had been fixed forever by some magic spell’ (1898c, 272); sunshine lit up the red sand-banks which then glowed like ‘Nibelungen gold’ and the sun played with the mist in a vision of ‘Turneresque’ beauty (1982, 239). These frequent literary and artistic allusions provided a frame of reference through which her readers could familiarise themselves with the landscapes of west Africa. Kingsley also referred to popular authors of the time (Dickens, Twain, Dr Johnson, Stevenson, Goethe, Kipling), and made unfamiliar landscapes recognisable by comparing them to the works of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, again re-emphasising her own romanticism. She even compared the sounds of the forest to symphonies by Beethoven and Handel.

Although west Africa was strange and exotic to her, on occasions Melville's writing is similar to Kingsley's in relating the surroundings of Sierra Leone to her readers. She compared the ‘soft quiet beauty’ of the beach landscape to paintings by Claude and Poussin (1968, 6-7), and an approaching tornado was described as ‘great fleecy clouds rising above Mount Oriel; their curled outlines forming many a Hogarth-like portrait against the sky’ (ibid., 91). Like Kingsley, Melville sought to familiarise the sounds of the forest for her readers. Not all of the associations were pleasant or pastoral: she wrote, ‘When darkness sets in, the hum of millions of insects arose—and a very unsentimental memory it brought along with it, being exactly like the noise of a large manufactory where spinning machines are constantly in motion’ (ibid., 8). White women travellers also drew analogies between British and west African environments in order to render them more familiar. Melville compared the deforested hills around Sierra Leone to those in Scotland, ‘where green herbage, heather, and furze appear in alternate patches’ (ibid., 6), and Slessor compared the sunsets of Calabar with those in Scotland (Missionary Record, February 1887, 337). Colvile described a scene approaching Bonny Town in a similar manner: ‘Two minute's walk brought us to the margin of a deep pool surrounded by gigantic cotton trees, whose heavy shade and buttressed roots would almost have made one imagine one's self in some early English cloister’ (1893, 303). Larymore described a scene at Jebba in Northern Nigeria which:

… changed abruptly from low-lying grassy marsh land and warm sand-banks, where the wild duck and geese were wont to gather, to great beetling cliffs and walls of rock, which rose sheer from the still water, seemingly shutting in the river altogether, and giving the impression of one end of a highland loch.

(1908, 153)

Of course, the desire for order through the construction of familiar frames of reference is itself imperialist. Layers of meaning are imposed on the landscapes of west Africa by the roving, colonising eye. However, by painting their more familiar pictures of west African landscapes and making them recognizable to their readers, women travellers challenged the image of the exotic and frightening pandemonium which characterised many descriptions of west Africa during the nineteenth century. The landscapes in the narratives of these women were ordered and, to some extent, demystified.

THE PASTORAL MYTH AND WEST AFRICA AS ‘GARDEN’

If there were similarities in the ways in which women travellers represented the physical environments of west Africa as ordered and familiar, there were also great differences in their designs upon their immediate surroundings. Kingsley and Slessor attempted to blend in with their surroundings, and related to them in a personal and subjective way. Kingsley, on occasions, felt that she was part of the landscape and identified with the physical environment on a deeply spiritual level. Mills (1991, 99) describes this more personalized form of writing as ‘going native’, arguing that it was a challenge to male Orientalism and a different way of representing non-European landscapes. In the case of Slessor, this phrase is particularly apt. She lived in African huts, grew and ate African food, drank unboiled water, and attempted to become assimilated into local ways of life as much as possible (McEwan, 1995b). Thus, Kingsley and Slessor envisaged themselves having as little impact upon the natural environment as was possible. This was not the case with some of the other women travellers in west Africa.

On occasions, and to differing extents, Larymore, Melville and Foote perceived west Africa as a potential garden in need of cultivation. In Victorian Britain suburbs were developing rapidly, and gardens came to be perceived as refuges amidst the enormity of urban sprawl, ‘bowers and oases in a desert of brick and mortar’ (Griffin, 1977, 171). In west Africa, the garden was a retreat from the surrounding ‘wilderness’, a small area of ‘civilization’ on the imperial frontier. Just as urban gardens in England could only be imagined in relation to the city, which shaped and defined them by surrounding and threatening them, gardens in west Africa could only be imagined in relation to the surrounding ‘wilderness’. Both survived under siege, a passive persistence emphasised and symbolized by closure and concentration. Furthermore, ‘the garden served as a rich metaphorical link; English order and productivity amid the tropical chaos of overgrown jungle or scrubby savannah’ (Callaway, 1987, 178-9). Sections within the narratives of Larymore, Melville and Foote were illustrative of attempts by white women to impose their own personalities as well as British order upon the landscapes of west Africa. They were all impressed by the creation of gardens and farmland in the forests and remarked upon the contrast between these ordered features and the surrounding wilderness. Melville created a vision of west African landscapes that was consistent with anti-slavery depictions of an earthly paradise. She particularly delighted in the gardens in Freetown that, despite their exoticism, reminded her of home:

I was enchanted by the luxuriance of the trees … Innumerable blossoms shone in all directions; one resembling a branch of red coral; another, still more gorgeous, with its festoons of orange and scarlet, reminded me of the feathers of the bird of Paradise; while the pale lilac colours of a third recalled the image of more northern gardens, and claimed a kindly remembrance of old familiar flowers, although the perfume of orange and lime trees was all around us.

(1968, 8)

Here, Melville derived pleasure from a landscape that had been appropriated and transformed by the agents of British imperialism, but she also delighted in the more natural landscapes. For her, the beauties of the surrounding vegetation were a consolation for what she perceived as the vagaries of the climate, and a source of comfort to her during her frequent illnesses. She found both the natural vegetation and the gardens and cultivated hillsides alluring. She wrote of the richness of her surroundings where:

[F]ruits and flowers, which attain to but a dwarfish height when coaxed in our home hothouses, spring up and flourish spontaneously in all their own native loveliness … [W]here the broad-leaved plantain and banana form a natural arcade that breathes coolness even under the sun of Africa; there the paw-paw raises its slight shaft, which you wonder can support the green and golden load at top, while its yellow blossoms perfume the air … But it is not here and there. Mingled in one rich mass of harmonious colouring, and flinging their sweet scent to the welcome sea-breeze, orange and lime trees, spangled with snowy flowers, and bending under the weight of their gorgeous fruit, vie with those of the luxuriant mango, the bay-leaved coffee, the pale-stemmed guava, the densely-foliaged rose-apple … and many hundred others in the bush.

(ibid., 226)

The profusion of references to flowers in Melville's descriptions is significant. Rose makes the point that flower painting was the one genre in which women were well-represented as artists during the nineteenth century. She writes (1993, 186):

Women were accepted as artists in this area because there was thought to be some sort of reciprocity between artist and subject; women were often described as flowers by Victorian gallants, and the flower analogy places both women and their work in the sphere of nature. The encoding of nature as feminine not only gave rise to a series of visual representations of women as passive and fertile as nature itself then; it also limited the possibilities for women as artists.

The same argument can, therefore, be applied when considering the landscape descriptions of women travel writers. By placing an emphasis on verbal portraits of flowers, Melville was ensuring that she did not transgress acceptable boundaries, and that she maintained a vision of her own femininity. Floral description was a particular narrative style that was accessible to her, and acceptable to her audience, and she used it extensively where other narrative styles, such as political discussion or scientific considerations, might have been deemed inappropriate by the conventions of the time. However, this form of writing was by no means innocent; instead it contributed to the imperial ‘science’ of animal and plant geography (McEwan, 1998b). Both Pratt and Mills point out that this type of description, and the emphasis on naming vegetation and assembling knowledge about it, was a product of the process of imperial expansion. There was a close relationship between this kind of natural history, cartography and the geographical enterprise of naming which were central to the emergence of Europe's ‘planetary consciousness’ (Pratt, 1992, 38) and the construction of global meaning. Travel writing, and the observational enterprise of documenting geography, flora and fauna, was fundamental to this. Therefore, white women travellers such as Melville and Foote depicted the landscape of west Africa as a ‘storehouse of random flora and fauna waiting for the civilizing ordering of the narrator with her Western science’ (Mills, 1994, 41).

Foote's narrative also draws heavily on the theme of the garden. She wrote, ‘Sierra Leone looks like one large garden, with its broad, red gravel walks, and groups of trees’. Like Melville, she could admire both the forests (albeit from a distance) and the cultivated and ‘tamed’ landscapes. She also took pleasure in her garden at Lagos, ‘full of oleander and acacia trees’ (1869, 7). That both Melville and Foote portrayed the natural vegetation as ‘garden-like’ in its appearance may be linked to the fact that they both travelled to west Africa with husbands who were involved in the anti-slavery effort. A good deal of anti-slavery literature tended to invoke images of an Arcadian Africa. Both Melville and Foote were of the opinion that, were it not for indigenous slavery, Britain would have little reason to be in west Africa; British administrators would no longer have to suffer in a climate unsuited to Europeans, and west Africans could be left alone to live in peace. The romance inherent in the anti-slavery movement thus informed the landscape descriptions of Melville and Foote.

Larymore had rather a different attitude, which was reflective of her presence in Nigeria at the beginning of the colonial period. To her, west Africa was not a ‘garden’ but a ‘wilderness’ which required taming. She took the theme of the garden a step further than both Melville and Foote, insisting that it was the duty of every Englishwoman resident in Africa to attempt to grow a garden as a constant reminder of England amid this ‘wilderness’, if only for the benefit of future residents. She wrote whilst looking over her Preperanda at Lokoja, ‘I then and there took to heart the lesson which I have tried to practise ever since—the absolute duty of planting trees everywhere for the benefit of one's successors’ (1908, 7). She even attempted to grow gardens in the most inhospitable of surroundings, such as her residency in Kano during the dry season. Certain parallels can be drawn at this juncture between those women, such as Larymore, living on the imperial frontier in west Africa and the experiences of women living on the North American frontier. As Kolodny (1984, xiii) writes:

After initial reluctance at finding themselves on the wooded frontiers …, women quite literally set about planting gardens in these wilderness places. Later, they eagerly embraced the open and rolling prairies of places like Illinois and Texas as a garden ready-made. Avoiding for a time male assertions of a rediscovered Eden, women claimed the frontiers as a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity. Massive exploitation and alteration of the continent do not seem to have been part of women's fantasies. They dreamed, more modestly, of locating a home and a familial human community within a cultivated garden.

Larymore certainly attempted to create a ‘sanctuary for an idealized domesticity’ on the imperial frontier of Nigeria. As mentioned in Chapter 1, she devoted an entire section of her book to advising her readers how to grow a flower garden, a verandah garden, a vegetable garden, a lawn, and trees and shrubs in the climate of west Africa. The imposition of English order upon the physical environment appealed to Larymore. She described the changes at Lokoja from her first visit, when the white settlement was surrounded by ‘a waste of swampy ground, thickly covered with coarse, rank grass’, to her visit five years later, when she found, ‘numbers of neat bungalows, well-tended little gardens, the swamp drained and converted into recreation ground, containing tennis courts, cricket pitch etc., good roads, and flowering trees and hedges, it is as pretty a little cantonment as one could wish to see …’ (1908, 9).

Larymore's intention was to create ‘little Englands’ wherever she went in Nigeria, and believed it was the duty of the wife of the Resident to ensure that this task was undertaken, both for the increased comfort of their husbands, and for the wider benefit to British imperialism in Africa. In her chapter on creating a lawn, she wrote:

It is said to be very dear to the heart of every Englishman to own a lawn, and it certainly should be doubly so to John Bull in exile; in a tropical country well-kept turf is much to be desired, there is nothing as cool and refreshing to tired eyes dazzled with the glare of the sunshine and baked earth, and perhaps, nothing that gives such a home-like and cared-for look to a West African compound.

(ibid., 224)

Such responses to the landscape were in marked contrast to the more harmonious relationships sought by Kingsley and Slessor. Although both responses were imperialist they were very different, and they highlight both the complexities within imperialist representations of west Africa and the importance of the spatial and temporal context of the journey.

‘EDENIC’ WEST AFRICA OR ‘THE LAND OF DEATH’?

This chapter has argued that the descriptions of the physical environment by white women travellers were extremely complex, and it is virtually impossible to define a singular ‘feminine’ response to west African landscapes. However, despite the preoccupation with the notion of the ‘garden’ amongst some women travellers, most, with the exception of Larymore, avoided the Western preoccupation with establishing control over the physical environment. They also avoided what Greenstein (1982, 138) refers to as the ‘Conradian appropriation of Africa as a metaphor for Western decadence’. Popular authors such as Henty, Haggard, Conrad and Cary sent their heroes to Africa to find a career, to make their fortune, to hunt big game, or simply to have fantastic adventures. As the work of the great explorers and the diaries of colonial administrators testify, historically Africa was the playground in which European men could fulfil their pre-pubescent fantasies. The protagonists of the literature of empire sought to test their manhood in the wildernesses of Africa, and they always returned victorious. This chapter has argued that, on the whole, white women travellers did not depict the landscapes of west Africa as a series of tests and obstacles to be overcome on their adventures. In general, women travellers also avoided depicting west Africa as an earthly paradise, a facet of the myth of the pastoral which was particularly prevalent in the works of anti-slavery advocates and the early missionaries.

The women of this study were aware of the vagaries of the west African climate, and one can derive from their descriptions their perception of the beauties of the physical environment, but also of the hazards they held for Europeans. For example, Colvile's chapter on west Africa was entitled rather sensationally ‘The Land of Death’. Slessor spent the greater part of her thirty-nine years in west Africa suffering from fever and disease. Melville, whose descriptions of the cultivated hillsides of Sierra Leone perhaps came closest to evoking Edenic images of the landscape, was convinced that disease and death were the price to be paid for the exquisite beauty of west Africa. As a consequence of illness she was often homesick. Despite her pantheism and, at times, transcendental relationship with the physical environment, Kingsley recognized the psychological malaise that could affect Europeans in west Africa, and although she felt at home in the forests, she realized that for those who could not identify with their surroundings, life there could be intolerable. She wrote:

A more horrible life than a life in such a region for a man who never takes to it, it is impossible to conceive; for a man who does take to it it is a sort of dream life … Mind you it is intensely beautiful, intensely soothing, intensely interesting if you can read it and you like it, but for a man who cannot and does not it is a living death.

(1899a, 39)

Hinderer captured the dangers of the climate when she wrote, ‘It's like a tiger, the way it leaps on one’ (1872, 91). After five years in west Africa she wrote, ‘It seems at times almost a question whether we can still be in the land of the living … the heat and oppression is terrible’.² The climate of west Africa, which was believed during the nineteenth century to be the cause of fever, disease and death, was the one aspect of the physical environment which drew the darkest descriptions from women travellers.

Sickness was often the cause of these sour meditations on the climate. As a consequence of their long duration in west Africa, the missionaries suffered most from the effects of the climate, and Slessor particularly so. Her final destination was Ikpe, located on a mosquito-laden creek. Slessor's house was too close to this creek and, consequently, she was constantly fever-ridden. Her discomfort was exacerbated by periodic affliction with erysipelas; on one occasion she lost all of her hair as a result. On another, when she was covered in boils from head to foot, she wrote, ‘Only sleeping draughts keep me from going off my head’ (Livingstone, 1916, 253). Her spirits were often low during the wet season, and at these times her descriptions of the physical environment lost their enthusiasm. She wrote:

The rain is drizzling down again, and I have a heavy dose of cold on my chest, and must go inside. One blink of sunshine comes, then a drizzle of rain and then a blink, and again a downpour, and all the time we are in a mist for it is never dry under the bush … I wish this month were past, to let us get a dry day now and then.³

However, the dry season brought greater hardships, with the dust-laden harmattans blowing down from the Sahara and draining her energy. She wrote of her longing for a ‘wee blink of home’, and then declared, ‘But though the tears are coming at the thought, you are not to think for one moment that I would take the offer were it offered to me! A thousand times no!’⁴ Her homesickness never lasted long, and despite the insalubrity of her surroundings she could still evince the beauty of Ikpe. The town was surrounded by stately palms, of which Slessor wrote, ‘These palms are my first joy in the morning when the dawn comes up, pearly grey in the mist and fine rain, fresh and cool and beautiful’ (Miller, 1946, 123). At other times she compared Africa favourably to Britain. She wrote, ‘how would you feel if you never had a breath of wind? never a leaf stirring, and everything reeking with heat? It is very trying, but infinitely more preferable to your cold’.⁵

Although the climate was often a source of fear and trepidation for women travellers, there was sometimes a certain fascination with its emanations. For example, the typhoons on the coast were particularly hazardous but at the same time beautiful. Melville wrote that the tropical storms ‘now make me tremble, though at first I used to watch their progress with admiration’ (1968, 69). Foote described them as ‘a wonderful and beautiful thing to witness’ (1869, 214-5). She wrote:

The sky became inky black, and the sea was of the same murky hue, making the crested waves gleam like snow. I stood on the verandah watching the approach of the wild wind, and was lost in awe and admiration of the beautiful sight presented by the harbour. In a moment the wind seemed to burst from above and lash the waves into fury. They sped before the typhoon at lightning speed, in a white line of foam, and the whole sheet of water, before so dark and quiet, became violently agitated. I was so absorbed in the beauty of the spectacle that I forgot how near the wind was upon us, when suddenly it clapped against the side of the house with a rushing sound, indescribably grand, and I found myself nearly blown off the verandah.

Therefore, even the supposedly deadly climate of west Africa produced spectacular sights and beautiful experiences that were recounted in travel narratives by British women. Although all these women had deeply aesthetic and personalized responses to the landscapes they encountered, they did not gloss over the very real dangers they believed the climate posed for Europeans. To them, west Africa was neither paradise nor pandemonium.

CONCLUSION

White women travellers were exposed to images of the ‘dark continent’ before they travelled to west Africa through various media, including colonial fiction, exploration literature, late-nineteenth century photography, imperial art and scientific treatises, and these often informed their descriptions of the physical environments of west Africa. This is particularly evident in their comments on climatic conditions, and the supposed links between climate and disease. However, their representations of west Africa were complex. This chapter has illustrated that various literary traditions in Victorian Britain influenced the ways in which women travellers wrote about the physical environment of west Africa. Victorian romanticism, ideas about the imperial frontier, and notions of the ‘wilderness’ and ‘sanctuary’ all exerted powerful influences upon the narratives of these women, and it could be argued that these were standard ways of representing the physical environment in travel literature at the time. The ambivalence apparent in these narratives was common to many colonial texts. However, to a certain extent women's descriptions of the physical environment were different from standard Victorian trayel texts. Their romanticism was overtly expressed because they were constrained to emphasise their landscape descriptions rather than to engage in scientific observations or political comments. As Mills (1991, 77-8) suggests, the scientific narrator figure was not unavailable to women travel writers, but was constantly undermined by other elements within their texts. Nineteenth-century convention held that women's travel narratives were not supposed to be ‘scientific’ and authoritative, but, rather, supposed to be amateurish and subjective. It is for this reason that travel narratives by women were often prefaced with disclaimers denying scientific, academic or literary merit. Furthermore, an emphasis on landscape description was a means of maintaining this amateurish style. This is recognisable as a common characteristic in travel literature by women travellers in west Africa (only Hinderer did not dwell to any great extent upon descriptions of her surroundings), as are their attempts to familiarize landscapes rather than exoticize them.

Women's experiences on the imperial frontier were different from those of male travellers; on the imperial frontier they confronted not only unfamiliar Others (vegetation, landscapes and peoples), but also ‘unfamiliar selves’ (Pratt, 1985, 121). For many of these women, travel was a liberating experience, and their travels were psychological journeys of self-discovery as well as physical journeys in west Africa. The most obvious example of this was Kingsley and her deeply spiritual meditations on, and identification with, west African environments. Furthermore, the depiction of west Africa as a ‘garden’ in travel texts written by women after 1840 was unique to women travellers such as Melville and Foote. In contrast, by mid-century west Africa had come to be popularly perceived within Britain, and particularly by explorers, travellers and the formulators of imperial policy, as the heart of a dark and dangerous continent. While the vagaries of the climate steered women travellers away from Arcadian visions of west Africa, they also tended to avoid depictions of west Africa as pandemonium, and relied more upon evoking the intricate beauties of their surroundings. However, although they ‘shied away from paradisal projection, they nonetheless seemed eager to tend the garden’ (Kolodny, 1984, 47). Therefore, although they often portrayed west African landscapes in standard ways, white women travellers also made important contributions to popular images of the physical environment of west Africa in Britain.

Despite the common emphasis on landscape description in the narratives of white women travellers, it cannot be argued that there was a singular ‘feminine’ representation of west African environments. This chapter has highlighted some of the major differences in the responses of women travellers in west Africa. Some of the women, such as Larymore, Foote, Colvile, and to a certain extent Melville, felt the need to maintain a distance between themselves and the landscapes they observed. Others, such as Slessor and, particularly, Kingsley, had much more personal relationships with the physical environment. Indeed, Flint comments on Kingsley, ‘No other writer, in my estimation, has so successfully evoked the beauty of the African forest, the steady tempo of the rivers, or the sounds and stirrings of the African night’ (1965, 156-7). The clarity and depth of Kingsley's imagery was inspired by her intimacy with her surroundings. Landscape descriptions were often revealing of the different circumstances in which the women travelled, and their views on British imperialism in west Africa. Melville's attitude was typical of the 1840s, and philanthropic perspectives on Africa heavily influenced her landscape descriptions. Her west Africa was almost Edenic, but she believed its climate to be unfit for Europeans, who were making sacrifices for the sake of eradicating slavery. Foote and Colvile shared Melville's feeling of not really belonging in west Africa. Larymore was the only women to adopt the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ trope in her landscape descriptions. She metaphorically claimed territory as her own in her writings, and was able to do so because, unlike the other women, she travelled in a part of west Africa which had been conquered by the British and formally incorporated into the British empire. In effect, she was surveying aesthetically territories that were about to be colonized and surveyed for military and economic purposes. She was part of a colonial expedition, and she was perhaps more aware of her power as a white woman in west Africa. Her attempts to impose British style gardens upon the landscape were an emanation of this feeling of power. Furthermore, the miasmatic theory of disease in west Africa had almost died out at the time of Larymore's travels, and there was less fear of the physical environment. It was now perfectly feasible to encourage the creation and enjoyment of gardens in west Africa. Kingsley's landscape descriptions were also unique, not only in their great abundance and poeticism, but also because they challenged many of the images of west Africa which prevailed during the 1890s, defying the conventions of the time. Unlike Colvile, who portrayed west Africa as the ‘Land of Death’, Kingsley drew on earlier romantic depictions in order to challenge negative representations of west Africa, and to raise interest in the possibilities for British imperialism there. She believed that if she could convince the British public that west Africa was not a land of darkness this would encourage the government to increase Britain's trading interests in the region.

It is possible to detect a certain amount of ambivalence towards the physical environment in the narratives of some women travellers, particularly in those of Larymore, Kingsley and Slessor. All these women expressed a desire to see the landscapes of west Africa remain unchanged. In her narratives, Kingsley even attempted to disguise her own presence in these landscapes by discursively placing herself within them and attempting to blend with them. However, these women could not blend into the landscapes through which they travelled simply because they were British and white. Their very presence in west Africa was facilitated by the same British economic, cultural and political imperialism that was altering the landscapes of west Africa. Furthermore, British women did not question their right to be in west Africa, nor the implications of their description and textual appropriation of the landscapes through which they travelled. It must also be emphasised that representations of west African landscapes, poetic or otherwise, were not innocent. These representations are noteworthy for their absence of African presence, and for their naturalization of human agency and vision. As Low (1996, 40) suggests, landscape descriptions in imperial discourse ‘naturalise the historical and material contexts which enabled the Western observer's presence and commentary on the African world’. The absence of African people in landscape description draws directly upon the colonial fantasy of virgin territory (McClintock, 1995, 28-31). This is perhaps ironic, given the density of population in some parts of west Africa during the nineteenth century. However, it was an imperial ‘trope’ that white women travellers did not disrupt. As the next two chapters demonstrate, descriptions of the peoples of west Africa were dealt with in separate parts of their travel narratives. Furthermore, the ambivalence evident in white women's relationships with west African landscapes is also apparent in their relationships with west African peoples.

Notes

1. See, for example, Stott (1989, passim); McClintock (1995, 21-31).

2. Hinderer to C. M. S., Ibadan, 17/5/55, David Hinderer Collection, Yoruba Mission/C. M. S. Papers, Birmingham University Archives.

3. Slessor to Mrs Findlay, 19/8/13, Cairns Papers, National Library of Scotland.

4. Slessor, ‘A missionary's testimony’, extract from a letter to friends, Women's Missionary Magazine, March 1910, 67.

5. Letter from Slessor at Ikot Obon, 25/1/14, Women's Missionary Magazine, February 1915, 78.

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