Buying Fish for London

At Talagouga, buying fish worked rather too well. Mary Kingsley paid generous opening prices, the sellers brought more, and she began running out of bottles and spirit. There was trade gin available, but she judged it too weak to preserve specimens. M. Forget, a missionary who had helped persuade people to bring her fish, supplied a bottle of alcohol from the dispensary.

Kingsley recorded the transaction in Travels in West Africa. It belonged to her second African journey, in 1895, when she was collecting along the Ogooué, a river flowing through what is now Gabon to the Atlantic. Fish bought there had to remain useful after a canoe journey, a sea passage and an arrival in a London museum. A catch that filled a basket was only the beginning.

Albert Günther, the British Museum zoologist who would examine her collection, had encouraged the river work. She intended to travel along the Ogooué; he wanted the opportunity to collect its fish used. Among the material he eventually described were three fish from Kondo-Kondo, an island in the rapids. One was an adult about fifteen centimetres long. The other two were young, about six centimetres each. Together they helped him distinguish a species he named Ctenopoma kingsleyae.

Fish that were somebody’s food

Kingsley had first visited West Africa in 1893. She had spent years helping care for her parents in England; their deaths in 1892 released her from those responsibilities. She travelled again at the end of 1894 and returned late in 1895 with natural-history material and the experiences that would supply her book. Her work ranged across zoology, trade and the societies she encountered. For the fish collection, access inland mattered as much as access to a coast.

The Ogooué lay in a French colonial territory. Trading firms, steamers and mission stations helped Kingsley move along it. At Talagouga she stayed with M. and Mme. Forget of the Mission Évangélique. The station occupied a steep hillside above the river. Mme. Forget provided a tidy room with an attached bathroom, which Kingsley welcomed as somewhere she could make a mess with fish without ruining her accommodation.

M. Forget initially doubted that she would obtain many specimens. The Fang people nearby caught plenty, he told her, but fish were a main source of food and they were reluctant to sell. He nevertheless persuaded some to bring their catches. The first sellers arrived that afternoon.

She continued buying over the following days. Her account jokes about the prices and calls the bargaining extortion, although Forget had already explained the sellers’ reluctance to part with food. Her appreciation of local help coexisted with the racial generalisations she published about the people who supplied it.

Preserving the catch made it possible for another naturalist to study it later. Enough material had to survive for the shape of a head, a row of scales or the structure of a fin to remain intelligible. Kingsley needed to get useful bodies to London as well as find interesting fish in the river.

Talagouga’s fish also encouraged her to go farther. She noticed their unusual forms and their differences from those she had obtained around Lambaréné, downstream. She wanted examples from the rapids above Njolé. That required a suitable canoe and people prepared to take it there.

A crew for the rapids

Kingsley offered a hundred francs to anyone who would lend a canoe and crew, with food, wages and working expenses paid as well. M. Gacon, another missionary, had a canoe and could spare experienced men. The proposed crew changed when local Fang recruits refused to go above Njolé. More Igalwa men were obtained through the trading station across the river.

At Njolé, French officials questioned the venture. Their objection included the composition of her party: she had eight Igalwas, rather than the Adooma crews regarded as specialists for the rapids. In her account she defended her men’s canoe skills, while Pierre interpreted. Permission secured, she went looking for provisions for them. A trader supplied fish or beef and biscuits; she also bought knives, cloth and other trade goods.

M’bo, the headman, steered from one end of the canoe; Pierre steered from the other. Kingsley sat on her portmanteau with a trade box behind her. Baggage, sleeping mats and mosquito curtains shared the vessel with the crew. They paddled or used poles, working close to the bank to escape the strongest current. Where a projecting point defeated them, some landed and scrambled across while the canoe was hauled around by a chain fastened to its bow.

Advice about shelter came in an unusually compact form. At a riverside village, a man tore a plantain leaf into five pieces and laid them along the canoe’s edge. The pieces represented villages upstream, their sizes and spacing corresponding to the settlements and the distances between them. He discussed their inhabitants with M’bo and recommended the fourth. Kingsley thanked the informants with tobacco before the canoe went on.

Fish entered the collection during this journey as well. In a quiet bay, Kingsley’s party met eight Fang women standing waist-deep in the river and dismantling a stockaded fish trap. The women gathered the catch into baskets. The canoe party stopped to talk, and Kingsley obtained specimens before continuing upriver. She supplied neither the women’s names nor the fish’s scientific identities. Those catches cannot be assigned to the three Kondo-Kondo specimens.

Her account of the rapids makes the work of moving a collection difficult to separate from the work of moving everyone aboard. Currents drove the canoe among rocks; the occupants got out and pushed it free in the water. At Boko Boko they clung to the bank and rocks, using hands, paddles and poles to get through. The collection travelled through the same interruptions as its carriers.

At Kondo-Kondo, an Adooma man from Kembe Island pointed out a shrub with long, tough branches trailing near the water. Men working the Alemba valued it as something to hold when a canoe overturned. Kingsley had already lost a pencil in a soaking. Her notebook, kept ready in her pocket, had become pulp. Several fish and a good deal of water had shared the pocket. She could no longer give all the mountain names she had been told.

What three fish could settle

Günther’s report, published in April 1896, judged the returned collection to be in excellent condition despite the limited means of preservation and transport. He counted about sixty-five species of fish and eighteen of reptiles. These were species represented in the collection, not a claim to sixty-five discoveries. Some material had been lost: a case containing fish from Lake Aznigo went missing when a boat overturned.

The fish from Kondo-Kondo gave him a small series with which to examine a problem in identification. Ctenopoma are deep-bodied fish with spiny fins. Günther compared the three with a related species, C. petherici. The proposed new species had a deeper body, and the young differed markedly from young C. petherici. Comparing adults alone could miss differences that became clearer when both growth stages were available.

He described the adult, then set out how the two smaller fish differed from it: body proportions, eye size, teeth and the serrated edges of the gill covers. The series let him distinguish changes with age from differences between species. He ended the description by locating all three at Kondo-Kondo.

They remain recorded as the species’ syntypes: the original group of specimens on which the name was established. Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes lists the three British Museum specimens together and retains Ctenopoma kingsleyae as a valid species. The locality is specific; the account of their capture is not. No secure evidence identifies them as the fish in Kingsley’s pocket or the specimens obtained from the women’s trap.

A closer look · 2:18 · English

Preserved fish, lost colour and type specimens

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A new name was one outcome of the collection. Another was a correction to a name already in use. Günther had described Mormyrus lepturus from two young fish only about three inches long. Kingsley brought examples from Talagouga that appeared adult and reached 190 millimetres. He could now amend his earlier description. With age, the lower lip thickened into a small fleshy projection. A feature missing from the young fish had arrived in London on the older ones.