Alone in West Africa

Une romancière australienne traverse seule la Gold Coast et le Nigeria en 1911, en hamac, et regarde tout avec un œil sans complaisance.

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Hereditary taste for wandering--A first adventure--“Little girls you must not be tired”--How Carlo was captured by savages in West Africa--Life in Ballarat--Nothing for a woman to do but marry--Marriage--Plans for wandering twenty years hence--Life in Warrnambool--Widowhood--May as well travel now there is nothing left--London for an aspirant in literature--Stony streets and drizzling rain--Scanty purse--Visit to the home of a rich African trader--Small successes--At last, at last on board s.s. Gando bound for the Gambia. Sometimes when people ask me with wonder why I went to West Africa, why I wanted to go, I feel as if that wife must have grown old and feeble and will bear no more men to send across the sea. I hope not. I trust not. More than ninety years ago she sent my mother's father into the Honourable East India Co.'s service, and then, in later years with his ten children to colonise Van Diemen's Land. Nearly sixty years ago she sent my father, a slim young lad, out to the goldfields in Australia, and she breathed her spirit over the five boys and two girls who grew up in the new land. I cannot remember when any one of us would not have gone anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. It would not have been any good pointing out the dangers, because dangers at a distance are only an incentive. There is something in the thought of danger that must be overcome, that you yourself can help to overcome, that quickens the blood and gives an added zest to life.

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