Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/469

 exculpate himself and inculpate Dr. Nassau for not having told him one was necessary. However, in a few minutes down the ladder comes the doctor, saying that a merciful view has been taken of the case, only we must not do it again. I solemnly assure him I will not; nor will I, for it's not my present intention to revisit an island that has only mud-fish in its lakes and courting whales in its encircling seas. While we have been busy over this affair, the lively Lafayette has been availing herself, as usual when my eye is off her, of the opportunity to get into mischief and bring down disgrace and derision upon her captain and crew; this time by jamming her topmast, with a nice, clean, new French flag on it, up the tap of a cistern—a most unseamanlike proceeding, and one which the instruction I have received from Captain Murray and Professor Roy—instruction, I am aware, I do small credit to—gives me no hints as to the proper way of dealing with, so we have to be ignominously extricated by the Minerve's crew, who roar at us, as we shove off, drifting, waddling and wobbling away, until we get our mainsail up again.

As the manœuvre of placing your main-top up a tap is not mentioned, even in my friend The Sailor's Sea Book I had better explain how the thing is done. The Minerve is an old line-of-battle ship, moored off Libreville to serve as a guard ship, a depot, and a hospital. She is by nature high out of water, on her gun deck is the hospital, on the main deck the officers' quarters and the exercise ground for the sailors and marines, and above this again is another structure with cisterns on, their taps projecting overside—why I do not know, unless they screw hose on them, for I have never been aboard her or had her geography explained; above all is a roof of palm-leaf mats, in good old Coast style. The whole fabric, as Clark Russell would say, towers high into the air, just high enough about the cisterns for the lively Lafayette to get her precious spar up the nozzle of one of those taps, and of course it was a joke she could not resist trying on. I wish it clearly to be understood that I am not saying a syllable against the staid, stately Minerve. The only indiscretion she was ever guilty of was once leaving her moorings and going off with a heavy tornado, to the horror of Glass and Libreville, drifting