no one of the ship's passengers, crowded six deep along
the rail, blamed them. The skull of the Ethiopian may be hard, but
it is most unfair to be swathed like a mummy so that you can neither
kick nor strike back, and then have your head battered against a
five-thousand-ton ship.

How the boys who paddled the shore boats live long enough to learn
how to handle them is a great puzzle. We were told that the method
was to take out one green boy with a crew of eleven experts. But how
did the original eleven become experts? At Accra, where the waves
are very high and rough, are the best boat boys on the coast. We
watched the Custom House boat fight her way across the two miles of
surf to the shore. The fight lasted two hours. It was as thrilling
as watching a man cross Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. The greater
part of the two hours the boat stood straight in the air, as though
it meant to shake the crew into the sea, and the rest of the time it
ran between walls of water ten feet high and was entirely lost to
sight. Two things about the paddling on the West Coast make it
peculiar; the boys sit, not on the thwarts, but on the gunwales, as
a woman rides a side-saddle, and in many parts of the coast the boys
use paddles shaped like a fork or a trident. One asks how, sitting
as they do, they are able to brace themselves, and how with their
forked paddles they obtained sufficient resistance. A coaster's
explanation of the split paddle was that the boys did not want any
more resistance than they could prevent.

[Illustration: The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle.]

There is no more royal manner of progress than when one of these
boats lifts you over the waves, with the boys chanting some wild
chorus, with their bare bodies glistening, their teeth and eyes
shining, the splendid muscles straining, and the dripping paddles
flashing like twelve mirrors.

Some of the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power,
and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in
unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a
sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to the
newly rich.

I knew I had left the West Coast when, the very night we sailed from
Sierra Leone, for greater comfort, I reached for a linen bed-spread
that during four stifling, reeking weeks had lain undisturbed at the
foot of the berth. During that time I had hated it as a m