Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/113

 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 super-intending 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 boat; 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 of 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 risk 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 off panic-stricken Africans and their belongings, surrounded by such a sea, with its crowd of expectant sharks, in the West African climate, is good work for a good man, and my fellow-countryman did it and did it well.