Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/663

 you can hardly ever believe what people say about each other in West Africa, so the problem is unsolved.

The Pirate rocks extend S. W. from Bobia Island, and are quite uninhabited. It is possible, at certain states of the tide, in calm weather, to get from Bobia to the nearest one, on which there are a few trees. The next rock has a remarkable hole in it through which the water flies in a great jet, and as the weather was rough the day we were round it, this showed grandly. The others that are above water are mere rocky pinnacles.

These rocks are by no means all the rocks in Ambas Bay, which, like Corisco Bay, though to a far less extent, is not half so good a harbour as it looks on a map.

In 1858 the Spanish Government decided definitely to retake possession of Fernando Po, which had been lent to the English for the purpose of forming a naval depot for suppressing the slave trade, and in May of that year, the Spanish man-of-war Vasco Nuñez de Balboa came into Clarence and issued a lengthy proclamation, one article of which was:—"The religion of this colony is that of the Roman Catholic Church, as the only one of the kingdom of Spain, with the exclusion of any other, and no other religious profession is tolerated or allowed but that made by the missionaries of the aforesaid Catholic religion, and no school allowed."

This proclamation, says Mr. Hutchinson, who was then the English consul for the Bights, fell like a bombshell amongst the inhabitants of Clarence, who had been since 1843 under the religious superintendence of the Baptist missionaries, and who, since their first settlement there under Captain Owen in 1827, had considered themselves to be safely under the protection of the British Government, and therefore entitled to perfect liberty of religious worship. A remonstrance was at once made by the Baptists against this proclamation as being contrary "to that liberty of worship decreed and allowed by Don J. O. de Lorena, captain of the Spanish Navy and commander of the brig Nervion, in the year 1844, and confirmed by the Spanish Consul-General (the Chevalier Guillemard) in the year 1846." This remonstrance further