the relative value of white and blue kokos as food-supply for
labourers, and one of them talked a little wildly, for him, at
moments. But there was no headlong dash for water, surrounded
in blue flames of bad language, such as I am accustomed
to when a lord of creation gets drivers on him, and I
proudly thought that to me alone belonged the glory of
quietly living down driver ants, but I subsequently learnt
that England had to share this honour in the field of colonial
enterprise with Germany; and so, as Mr. Pepys would say,
home to Victoria, in the lovely late afternoon. There was just
a doubt, however, for half-an-hour or so, whether we should
succeed in rounding the rocky promontory that separates
Ambas from Man-o’-War Bay, for the sea had got rough in
the mysterious way seas do down here, without any weather
reason, and the wind, what there was of it, was dead against
us. But although my dress was nearly reduced to the dead
level of my other dresses, the thing was done.
The next few days I spent expecting the Nachtigal. Of
course I had unpacked all my things again and most of them
were at the wash, when Idabea rushes into my room saying,
“ Nachtigal kommt,” and I packed furiously, and stood by to
go aboard, having been well educated by my chief tutor,
Captain Murray, on the iniquity of detaining the ship. I
hasten to say the lesson on this point I never brought down
on myself. I have never robbed a church or committed a
murder, so should never dream of plunging into this lowermost
depth of crime without a preparatory course of capital
offences. When, however, I was packed, I found that it was
not the Nachtigal which had come in, but the Hycena— the
guard-ship of Cameroons River— out for an airing, and as her
■commander Captain Baham, kindly asked me on board to
lunch, I had to unpack again. A t lunch I had the honour of
meeting the two officers who had first ascended the peak of
Cameroon from the south-east face, and I learnt from them
many things which would have been of great help to me had I
had this honour before I went up, but which were none the
less good to know; and during the whole of their stay in
Ambas Bay I received from the Hycena an immense amount
o f pleasure, courtesy, and kindness, adding to the already great
debt in these things I owe to Cameroons— a debt which I
shall never forget, although I can never repay it.
The third announcement of the Nachtigal proved true, and
with my dilapidated baggage I went round in her, under the
charge of Herr von Besser, into Old Calabar, where I received
every hospitality from Mr. Moore and Mr. Wall, for my good
friends Sir Claude and Lady MacDonald had left for England
some months previously— for the last time as it turned out,
for shortly after his arrival in England Sir Claude was sent as
British Minister to Pekin.
When I reached Calabar I found that the Bakana, commanded
by Captain Porter and having for her chief engineer
Mr. Peter Campbell, was expected to come in daily, and being
a sister ship to the Batanga and so one of the finest boats
in the service, I decided to wait for her, going up to say
good-bye to Miss Slessor at Okyon during the few days at
my disposal.
We had a comfortable voyage up to Sierra Leone, where a
gloom fell over the whole ship from the death of the purser,
Mr. Crompton. It was one of those terribly, sudden, hopeless
cases of Coast fever, so common on the West Coast, where no
man knows from day to day whether he or those round him
will not, before a few hours are over, be in the grip of malarial
fever, on his way to the grave.