knot
tramp, which had come across from Brazil to Loando, and had been lucky
enough to pick up half a cargo of coffee there for Lisbon. She called in
at Banana, the station on the mangrove-spit at the mouth of the Congo,
where the river pilots live (and on occasion die), and where the Dutch
factory used to bring trade till the Free State killed it with duties;
and at Banana she had further fortune. There were two hundred and thirty
negroes there, Accra men and Kroo-boys mostly, a gang that had made
their fifteen or twenty pounds apiece on the railway, and were waiting
to go home.

The passenger-boys had collected their chattels, and were gathering in a
howling chattering mob by the surf-boats ready to go on board, when the
first notion came to me of joining her. It was the Danish harbour-master
who gave it. He came up, under his old white umbrella with the green
lining, to the house where I was staying, and told me that the tramp was
going to call in at San Thome and the Bonny River.

"Now, we don't hanker to get rid of you here, Mr. Calvert," he said,
"but if you want to climb that mountain in Fernando Po, you're not
likely to get so good a chance for the next three months to come. Your
place is on the road between San Thome and Bonny, though of course
you'll have to make it worth the skipper's while to stop. But that's
your palaver."

"Can you put a figure on it?" I asked.

"I should take it," said the harbour-master, "that you could hustle the
man into Fernando Po for ten sovereigns. He's only a Portugee. Come
aboard now in my gig and see him."

The tramp's interior was not inviting. We went into the chart-house and
drank the inevitable sweet champagne with the captain; and whilst the
bargain was being made, a thousand cockroaches crawled thoughtfully over
the yellow-white paint.

"I tell you straight," said the harbour-master in English, "she's a
dirty ship, and the chop'll be bad enough to poison a spotted dog. But
if you will go to these Portugee and Spanish places to sweat up
mountains, that's part of the palaver."

"Oh, if the grub's good enough for them, it won't kill me."

"Then if you will go, I'll send my boy off in the boat for your boxes
one-time, because the Old Man's in a hurry to be off. He's got a bishop
on board below, very sick with fever, and he wants to be out of this
stew and get to sea again as quick as it can be done. Thinks it'll give
the ship bad luck, I suppose, if the bishop pegs ou