n't let me frighten ye.
Take care of yourself, don't do too much work, and you may pull through
all right. Here's the order for the passage down Coast by the Liverpool
boat. And now I must ask you to excuse me. I've another client waiting."

* * * * *

In this manner, then, Captain Owen Kettle found himself, after many
years of weary knocking about the seas, enlisted into a regular
Government service; and although this Government, for various reasons,
happened to be one of the most unsatisfactory in all the wide, wide
world, he thrust this item resolutely behind him, and swore to himself
that if diligence and crew-driving could bring it about, he would rise
in that service till he became one of the most notable men in Africa.

"What I want is a competence for the missus and kids," he kept on
repeating to himself, "and the way to finger that competence is to get
power." He never owned to himself that this thirst for power was one of
the greatest curses of his life; and it did not occur to him that his
lust for authority, and his ruthless use of it when it came in his way,
were the main things which accounted for his want of success in life.

Captain Kettle's voyage down to the Congo on the British and African
S.S. _M'poso_ gave time for the groundwork of Coast language and Coast
thought (which are like unto nothing else on this planet) to soak into
his system. The steamer progressed slowly. She went up rivers protected
by dangerous bars; she anchored in roadsteads, off forts, and straggling
towns; she lay-to off solitary whitewashed factories, which only see a
steamer twice a year, and brought off little doles of cargo in her
surf-boats and put on the beaches rubbishy Manchester and Brummagem
trade goods for native consumption; and the talk in her was that queer
jargon with the polyglot vocabulary in which commerce is transacted all
the way along the sickly West African seaboard, from the Goree to St.
Paul de Loanda.

Every white man of the _M'poso's_ crew traded on his own private
account, and Kettle was initiated into the mysteries of the unofficial
retail store in the forecastle, of whose existence Captain Image, the
commander, and Mr. Balgarnie, the purser, professed a blank and
child-like ignorance.

Kettle had come across many types of sea-trader in his time, but Captain
Image and Mr. Balgarnie were new to him. But then most of his
surroundings were new. Especially was the Congo