Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/385

 "You come with me up there." I said I'd see about it later on, for the present I had seen enough men, elephants, gorillas and leopards, and I preferred to go into wild districts under the French flag to any flag. I am still thinking about taking that voyage, but I'll not march through Coventry with the crew we had down the Rembwé—that's flat, as Sir John Falstaff says. Picture to yourselves, my friends, the charming situation of being up a river surrounded by rapacious savages with a lot of valuable goods in a canoe and with only a crew to defend them possessed of such fighting mettle as our crew had demonstrated themselves to be. Obanjo might be all right, would be I dare say; but suppose he got shot and you had eighteen stone odd of him thrown on your hands in addition to your other little worries. There is little doubt such an excursion would be rich in incident and highly interesting, but I am sure it would be, from a commercial point of view, a failure.

Trade however, even when carried on in a safer, saner way than our above scheme provides, is falling off on the Rembwé and 'Como. The white firms no longer find it pays to put white agents up at the factories on the Rembwé at Agonjo and Isango, and on the 'Como at N'enge N'enge, although they still keep the factories going under black agents. N'enge N'enge, a large island just inside the 'Como mouth by the confluence with the Boqué, has still a white representative missionary of the American Presbyterian Mission—the mission that first commenced working in this Gaboon, Ogowé, and Batanga region; and the station at N'enge N'enge is still in connection with the headquarters of this mission at Baraka, not having been handed over with the Ogowé stations to the Mission Evangélique of Paris. But apart from this mission station and the evangelising tours made by the energetic Roman Catholic priests, the upper Gaboon region is not much troubled by white enterprise. Now and again that very hard-working little vessel, the gunboat stationed at Libreville, goes up river to see whether the natives are behaving properly, or to point out their errors to them.

The reason for the falling off of the trade in this particular district is, I suspect, not—as is suggested—the impoverishment