legend of a more cheerful character than these he evidently
felt was unfitted to our situation, and flippant, considering the
way those coals were being wasted. Still the Benguella came
not, though we sat up very late looking for her, and at last we
turned in.
The next morning we were up early. There was no
- Benguella. The Eko was still rolling about near us waiting
for her, and the Eko’s passengers having had, as I heard, in vivid
account some months after from Mrs. S. with many chei I
cheis! a wretched, ratful, foodless night, the Eko naturally
not laying herself out for water pic-nic parties. We fared well
on the Janette, our guardian angel providing us with an
excellent breakfast. My fellow countryman’s anxiety had
now passed into a dark despair. He no longer looked for the
South-Wester. It was past tha t; but he borrowed Captain
Heldt’s best telescope and watched the Government steamer,
which lay smoking away like a Turkish man-of-war, waiting for
him. Captain Heldt tried to cheer him with more stories,
lager beer, and cigars, and at last produced an auto-harp, an
instrument upon which he was himself proficient and capable
of playing not only the march from “ Ajax,” but “ Der
Wacht am Rhein” and “ Annie Laurie.” This temporarily
took my fellow countryman’s mind off coals, and he set about
to acquire the management of the auto-harp and rapidly did
so, but then he only picked out with infinite feeling and pathos
“ Home, Sweet Home,” so it was taken from him. Then we
had long accounts of the region round the Swakop river,
from which the Janette had just come, and at last, about two
o’clock, my fellow countryman sadly said : “ Here she comes ! ”
and there she did come, and in a short time the graceful old
Benguella was duly anchored in the roads and I was taken on
board by my two friends.
We none of us felt very enthusiastic, I fear. I had never
been on her before, so regarded her as an utter stranger. My
fellow countryman felt it was a hanging matter by now for
him on shore, because of those coals, and so did not feel in
such a hurry to get there. And to Captain Heldt she was a
rival. But often those things which you expect least of
ultimately give you the most pleasure, as the moralistywould
say, and moreover when you are on the Coast you never know
whom you may meet; and as I, after a good deal of trouble in
the Janette’s boat to get my companions to go on deck before
me up the rope ladder, elaborately climbed that thrilling
nautical institution myself and had got my head over the top
of the bulwark, I saw a yard off me, dead ahead, still superintending
the hatch— my first tutor in Kru English. It
was in ’93 that he had last seen me, a very new comer, going
ashore at San Paul de Loanda from the Lagos, on which
| vessel he was then officer, and vowing I meant to go home
by the next b o a t; now seeing me coming on board, in a way
I am sure would have done credit to a Half Jack captain,
|he naturally asked for an explanation, which, being quite
busy with the rope-ladder palaver, I did not then and there
give him.
In a short time I had said farewell, with many thanks to my
two friends who had taken such care o f me on Lagos Bar, and my
fellow countryman returned in the Eko, which, having got her
mails and passengers safe and sound on to the Benguella, was
at last going in to Lagos again, and I am sure it will be a
relief to you to know that none of those expected troubles on
shore befell the official, but he lived to earn the gratitude and
esteem of Lagos and its Government for his noble and determined
services in working and surveying that awful bar. When,
a few months after our amusing experiences on it, it went on
worse than ever, and vessel after vessel was wrecked, he
rescued their passengers and crews at the great ris'k of his own
life ; for going alongside a vessel that is breaking up in the
breakers, and in an open boat with a native crew, and getting
jiff panic-stricken Africans and their belongings, surrounded by
such a sea, with its crowd of expectant sharks, in the West
Sftfrican climate, is good work for a good man, and my fellow-
jeountryman- did it and did it well.
G 2