Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/436

 but the habit of forgetting in a day or so the orders he had issued made the place habitable at all. At one time there was an ordinance that all lights on the island should be out at IO ., and as your African is a sad dog for late hours, this bored him terribly. Shortly after, there was another that all goats should be kept tied up. This fairly ran the native off his legs trying to catch them. The goats, I believe, liked it, regarding it as a kind of a game, though they made an awful ba-aaing which kept the lightless Africans awake. I do not know what the present Governor is like. Maybe he would have seen fit to regard me as a filibuster coming in flying the French flag, intent on annexing Corisco to Gaboon, and might have sent me off to prison at Fernando Po, as happened to Mr. Ibea once for some religious palaver he got into with the two Catholic priests who are on the island.

These priests, and I believe three nuns, are the only white live people on the island now. Dead white people are there in the two cemeteries in a sad quantity; for in the early fifties, when the American Presbyterian Mission opened work on this Coast, their opinion was that the fever risk for the white ministers would be less on this island, separated as it is by some twenty miles of sea from the mainland, and that they could establish a station on it and live in comparative safety, while they educated natives to go and do the work on the mainland. But Corisco Island behaved like every other West Coast "sanatorium," and demonstrated that it was no healthier than its neighbouring country; and several ministers having died and most of the remainder suffering severely from fever, they decided to move on to the continent, where they could carry on their work directly and could not be much worse off than they were on the island.

Dr. Nassau, of whom I have already spoken, and Mrs. Hogden, whose husband lies buried on Corisco, are the surviving members of the early days of the American Presbyterian Mission; and on the Mission moving to the continent, the Doctor, more suo, made some wonderful journeys hundreds of miles into the interior, where no white man had been before, and where in many places no white man has been since. I am quite aware that Dr. Nassau was the first white man to send home