rst experience of West African
service. We were riding with our head to the north-west under the
combined influence of wind and tide together, with the low point--named
Banana Peninsula, so the master informed me, though _why_ it should be
so named I never could understand, for there was not a single
banana-tree upon the whole peninsula, as I subsequently ascertained.
Let me see, where was I? I have gone adrift among those non-existent
banana-trees. Oh yes, I was going to attempt to make a word-sketch of
the scene which surrounded us after we had let go our anchor and furled
our canvas. The sea-breeze was piping strong from the westward, while
the tide was ebbing down the creek from the northward, and under these
combined influences the _Barracouta_ was riding with her head about
north--west. Banana Peninsula lay ahead of us, trending away along our
larboard beam and slightly away from us to the southward for about
half-a-mile, where it terminated in a sandy beach bordered by a broad
patch of smooth water, athwart which marched an endless line of mimic
breakers from the wall of flashing white surf that thundered upon the
outer edge of the protecting shoal three-quarters of a mile to seaward.
The point was pretty thickly covered with bush and trees, chiefly
cocoa-nut and other palms--except in the immediate vicinity and in front
of the two factories, where the soil had been cleared and a sort of
rough wharf constructed by driving piles formed of the trunks of trees
into the ground and wedging a few slabs of sawn timber in behind them.
The point, for a distance of perhaps a mile from its southern extremity,
was very narrow--not more than from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
yards wide--but beyond that it widened out considerably until it merged
in the mainland. On the opposite side of the creek, on our starboard
quarter and astern of us, was what I at first took to be a single
island, but which I subsequently found to be a group of about a dozen
islands, of which the smallest may have been half-a-mile long by about a
third of a mile broad, while the largest was some nine or ten miles long
by about three miles broad. These islands really constituted the
northern bank of the river for a distance some twenty-four miles up the
stream, being cut off from the mainland and from each other by narrow
canal-like creeks running generally in a direction more or less east and
west. The land all about here was low, and to a