Nevertheless, I do not interrupt and say, "Stuff," because if you do this to the old coaster he only offers to fight you, or see you shrivelled, or bet you half-a-crown, or in some other time-honoured way demonstrate the truth of his assertion, and he will, moreover, go on and say there is more hydrophobia in the aforesaid towns than elsewhere, and as the chances are you have not got hydrophobia statistics with you, you are lost. Besides, it's very unkind and unnecessary to make a West Coaster go and say or do things which will only make things harder for him in the time "to come," and anyhow if you are of a cautious, nervous disposition you had better search your bunk for scorpions, before turning in, when you are on a vessel that has got timber on board, and the chances are that your labours will be rewarded by discovering specimens of this interesting animal.
Scorpions and centipedes are inferior in worrying power to driver ants, but they are a feature in Coast life, particularly in places--Cameroons, for example. If you see a man who seems to you to have a morbid caution in the method of dealing with his hat or folded dinner napkin, judge him not harshly, for the chances are he is from Cameroon, where there are scorpions--scorpions of great magnitude and tough constitutions, as was demonstrated by a little affair up here that occurred in a family I know.
The inhabitants of the French Ivory Coast are an exceedingly industrious and enterprising set of people in commercial matters, and the export and import trade is computed by a recent French authority at ten million francs per annum. No official computation, however, of the trade of a Coast district is correct, for reasons I will not enter into now.
The native coinage equivalent here is the manilla--a bracelet in a state of sinking into a more conventional token. These manillas are made of an alloy of copper and pewter, manufactured mainly at Birmingham and Nantes, the individual value being from 20 to 25 centimes.
Changes for the worse as far as English trade is concerned have passed over the trade of the Ivory Coast recently, but the way, even in my time, trade was carried on was thus. The native traders deal with the captains of the English sailing vessels and the French factories, buying palm oil and kernels from the bush people with merchandise, and selling it to the native or foreign shippers. They get paid in manillas, which they can, when they wish, get changed again into merchandise either at the factory or on the trading ship. The manilla is, therefore, a kind of bank for the black trader, a something he can put his wealth into when he wants to store it for a time.