Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/666

 the peculiarity of its situation and from local circumstances, Ambas Bay will probably be found to be one of the most healthy situations on the West Coast of Africa." Now this statement is utterly unsupported by facts, and there are no healthy places on the West Coast of Africa at all, so it cannot be more healthy than others, but it might be less unhealthy, and it is not even that; Ambas Bay, Cameroon River, and Gaboon being the three deadliest spots between Calabar and the Congo.

This idea that Ambas Bay and the mountain-sides of Mungo might give to the fever-smitten West Coast a reliable sanatorium, I have no doubt first arose from Mr, Saker's reports on it, and it is a theory that lives on, floating in air, as it were, after its foundations have been removed by experience, just as that other notion that there are no sharks south of the Congo; and it is hopeless work to attempt to destroy an idea of this kind. Any amount of sharks may display themselves ostentatiously south of Congo, and any amount of fever occur in Ambas Bay, but the statements survive. I have never been in Ambas Bay without finding severe cases of fever, and during my stay there this last time, the wife of the Basle missionary died of fever, and every one except Herr von Lucke, the head agent of the Ambas Bay Company, and myself, had fever more or less severely. This is reasonable enough when you look at the subject with the light of personal experience of the place. It is exceedingly hot, and exceedingly damp, and the cold winds from the mountains, and the sea-breezes that come into it in the mornings, are conducive to that main predisposing cause of an attack of fever—chill.

The idea that a sanatorium might be built high on the mountain, above the so-called fever line—a line that is merely an imaginative figment, for local conditions alter it in every separate place—at first seemed reasonable, but a closer knowledge of the peculiar meteorological conditions of the great mountain has proved this idea also to be an erroneous one.

A very noble and devoted Scotch gentleman named Thomson, possessed of considerable wealth and anxious to do what he could to aid the mission work of the United Presbyterians in Calabar, came out and did his best to