with this whale ; certainly if a small canoe had been as close
as we were it would have had a bad time of it, for with us the
mainsail protected us from a lot of water coming on board.
Goodness knows, however, we had enough, and did some
brilliant baling.
Rounding the reef we run inshore again, and Deat up to
Cape Clara, the shore showing the same type of dwarf cliff
and forest on top. Here and there a village shows, some
of them Fans who have arrived in the easterly end of their
migration and are, according to my crew, making by no means
good preparations for their eternal one.
On going round Cape Clara, to my joy we see the Grand
Estuary of Gaboon running inland before us, and the wind
being favourable, we run up it in grand style, looking, I am
sure, quite the well-handled racer. But “ short is human
glory, vain the vanity of man,” our true nature shows up
again soon in the way we approach the stately MinerveT
the guardship, to pass our papers. I hand over to Eveke,.
making it a rule, since I placed my bowsprit into a conservatory
and took the paint off one side of a small-pox
hospital, not to keep charge when approaching valuable
objects. Eveke promptly lowers the gaff, dropping the
mainsail completely over me, and hastily getting out our
oars, we avoid a collision and hook on to her ladder.
A frantic conversation is already going on between my
crew and the authorities before I extricate myself. It is-
a difficult thing to get anything like gracefully and amiably
from under a wet mainsail, but my prophetic soul tells me-
we are in disgrace, so I do my best and beam upon an
officer, who is at the bottom of the ladder, asking leading,
questions about the health of Corisco, and demanding the:
official bill of the same. Eveke is much alarmed, for I tell him
we shall get quarantined, and he ought to have seen about this,,
and at last by means of the feeble French of one of our crew, we
demonstrate to the officer that bills of health simply can’t be got.
on Corisco, there being no Spanish official on the forsaken
island to issue them. The official is unconvinced and goes up-
the ladder to see other officers about it. The interval of suspense
I employ in blowing up Eveke, and he in attempting to
exculpate himself and inculpate Dr. Nassau for not having
told him one was necessary. However, in a few minutes down
the ladder comes the doctor, saying that a merciful view has-
been taken of the case, only we must not do it again. I
solemnly assure him I will n o t; nor will I, for it’s not my
present intention to revisit an island that has only mud-fish
‘in its lakes and courting whales in its encircling seas. While
we have been busy over this affair, the lively Lafayette has-
been availing herself, as usual when my eye is off her, of the
opportunity to get into mischief and bring down disgrace and
derision upon her captain and crew ; this time by jamming her
topmast, with a nice, clean, new French flag on it, up the tap o f
a cistern— a most unseamanlike proceeding, and one which the
instruction I have received from Captain Murray and Professor
Roy— instruction, I am aware, I do small credit to-
— gives me no hints as to the proper way of dealing with,
so we have to be ignominously extricated by the Minerve’s'
crew, who roar at us, as we shove off, drifting, waddling and
wobbling away, until we get our mainsail up again.
As the manoeuvre of placing your main-top up a tap is not
mentioned, even in my friend The Sailor’s Sea Book I had
better explain how the thing is done. The Minerue is an old
line-of-battle ship, moored off Libreville to serve as a guard
ship, a depot, and a hospital. She is by nature high out of
water, on her gun deck is the hospital, on the main deck the
officers’ quarters and the exercise ground for the sailors and
marines, and above this again is another structure with
cisterns on, their taps projecting overside— why I do not know,
unless they screw hose on them, for I have never been aboard
her or had her geography explained; above all is a roof of
palm-leaf mats, in good old Coast style. The whole fabric,,
as Clark Russell would say, towers high into the air, just high
enough about the cisterns for the lively Lafayette to get her
precious spar up the nozzle of one of those taps, and of course-
it was a joke she could not resist trying on. I wish it clearly
to be understood that I am not saying a syllable against the
staid, stately Minerue. The only indiscretion she was ever
guilty of was once leaving her moorings and going off with a
heavy tornado, to the horror of Glass and Libreville, drifting;