Page:Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Volume 1 (2nd edition).djvu/218

190 passed many towns and villages during the day, and where the banks were not overflown they were cultivated.'

'At half-past eight we found ourselves influenced by the tide, and at every ten or twenty miles we were either on a bank or stuck fast in the underwood; so that the men, as on former occasions, were obliged to get out and lift the canoe over. Our track was through avenues of mangroves: in many places the trees were arched over so thickly, that we could see no light through them. We continued on, winding in and out, through small creeks, until nine on the 15th, when we met three large canoes. In one of them was the old King Fourday, and several fetish priests; in another were the brothers of King Boy, and in the third those of Mr. Gun. They had been to the town of Brass, and had brought old King Fourday and the fetish priests to escort us into their country. A short time after our arrival at Brass we made fast to the trees, when the tide ebbed, and left us high and dry on black mud half an hour after.'

'After leaving Eboe we passed two small branches running to the west, and also two running in the east. The country through which the river winds is low, without a rising ground for many miles. The banks are for the most part swampy: where they are at all habitable, villages are seen, with patches of cultivated ground. On the 13th we passed a village on the right bank. where the stillness of the water and much white foam we imagined to be the effects of the tide. This place is about seventy or eighty miles from the sea. Near the mouth of the river, and in our way up to Brass Town, the banks were so much overflown, that the trees appeared to be growing out of the water.'

The accompanying sketch of the course of the Quorra is combined with Captain Clapperton's map on a reduced scale, and it is due to the Society to offer a few remarks on the method which has been adopted in tracing it. The only instrument possessed by the travellers was the mariner's compass, and even this was lost at Kirree, which is placed about 180 miles in a direct line from the mouth of the river; therefore, in the absence of all means of ascertaining, with any pretensions to certainty, a single geographical point, the position of Boossà, and that of the mouth of the river Nun, lying nearly at the two extremes of the whole journey, were adopted as limits within which the course of the river navigation between these places must necessarily fall. The daily progress of the travellers in course and distance, according.to their own estimation, was then subjected to rigorous scrutiny; and the probable distance supposed to have been travelled each day, in which allowance was made for the rate