Benin R.
day the SS. Loanda appeared from England with
dates up to the 11th of June.
On the 5th we passed Lagos roadstead, where three
steamers and two sailing vessels’were at anchor, and
on the 6th we arrived off Quettah. By this time thé
Kinsembo, collecting produce at these various small
ports, had been well nigh filled by the bountiful shipments
from the Bonny and Benin Rivers. . Nun
River, the main channel of the Niger, we did not see,
owing to the inscrutable bye-laws which govern these
various steamship lines from Liverpool. The local
news at Quettah is that a white man has been
sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for whipping
a negro ! At Bay Beach we passed the Mowé,
a German war vessel, at anchor.
On the 12th we arrived at Sierra Leone. My
friend, the harbour-master, who once mistook my
steamer for a pirate ship, is still flourishing, and Her
Majesty’s coloured subjects still continue to dwell with
exasperating emphasis on the merits of “ this colony.”
Captain Jolly, of the Kinsembo, however, differs from
the coloured gentlemen of Sierra Leone. He obtained
a slight hint that there was a pestilence in the town,
and hastily proceeded to sea after only a three hours’
stoppage, and we thus saw the last of the African
continent. ;
On the 29th of July thé directing managers of the
British and African Steamship Company kindly permitted
the Kinsembo to land me at Plymouth, whence
I hastened to London. Four days-later I presented
my report to His Majesty the King of the Belgians,
who was spending the summer at Ostend, that the
mission he had given me to perform in the Congo
Basin was accomplished, with vastly greater success
than the most sanguine of those gentlemen who sat
in the Council held at the Royal Palace in December,
1878, could ever have anticipated; and I have no
reason to believe that His Majesty was displeased with
the results of thèse long years of bitter labour.
Sierra
Leone.