Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/659

 —the sort that you come across in senemens at home, with wire-work legs, I do not mean that Mondoleh has wire-work legs under water, but it looks as if it might have. It is a bunch of crammed-together vegetation, half a mile long, 200 feet high, with rocky but rich soil made of a combination of decomposed rock and decomposed vegetation. On Mondoleh there is a very nice house, built, I believe, by that indefatigable consul Sir H. H. Johnston, once of Calabar, now of East Africa. As long as ever we have held Calabar it has been regarded as an unhealthy place to live in, so unhealthy that it was also regarded as a certainty that anywhere else must necessarily be better. At first when consuls were established there, they and the missionaries used to think it advisable to leave it during the wet season and go on to Fernando Po, which island we held up to 1858 as a naval depot for the suppression of the slave trade. Then Fernando Po, by means of several epidemics of yellow fever, demonstrated that it could not be regarded as a health resort, and Mondoleh was selected as a more suitable site for a consular residence. This house was then built nearly at its summit on the seaward side of the island, and was used until the Niger Coast Protectorate was formed under the governorship of Sir Claude MacDonald. This energetic officer soon recognised that let the healthiness of Mondoleh be what it might, it was an inconvenient spot for a consul to have as his chief residence; because, for one thing, it was a difficult place to get on to,and for another a difficult place to get off from, as the only means of doing either of these things was to wait for a man-of-war coming along, or to go knocking about this very draughty bit of rocky Atlantic in an open gig. Also there was not enough room on it for the enlarged staff and the Haussa troops. So Sir Claude built the present fine Government head-quarters in Old Calabar, and not being a man who would leave his staff to live or die in a place where he would not do so himself, he disposed of the house at Mondoleh to the German Governor, who was most anxious to possess it, for it was the only piece of British territory left in Cameroon, and its acquisition as it were rounded off the German Empire. It is not now used as a residence for any one but a black caretaker and his family,