The expedition of 1833 was deficient in many things.  The power and speed of the steamers were insufficient, their draught of water too great, and they were so long delayed in their outfit and in their sea-voyage that they found the river falling, and were detained by shoals and sand-bars.  The accommodations were unsuitable; and the men, exposed to a bad atmosphere among the mangroves at the mouth of the river, and confined in the holds of the vessels, were attacked by fever, and but ten of them survived.  The expedition, however, succeeded in reaching Rabba, on the Niger, five hundred miles from the sea, ascended the Benue, eighty miles above the confluence, and charts were made and soundings taken for the distance explored.

In 1842 the British government made a new effort to explore the Niger, and built for that purpose three iron steamers, the Wilberforce, Albert, and Soudan, vessels of one hundred to one hundred and thirty-nine feet in length.  The error committed in the first expedition, of too great draught, was avoided; but the steamers had so little power and keel that their voyage to the Niger was both tedious and hazardous, and their speed was found insufficient to make more than three knots per hour against the current of the river.  Arriving on the coast late in the season, they were unable to ascend above the points already explored, and the officers and men, suffering from the tedious navigation, close cabins, and effluvia from the falling river, lost one-fourth of their number by fever, while the African Kroomen, accustomed to the climate and sleeping on the open deck, enjoyed perfect health.  It was the intention of government to establish a model farm and mission at the confluence of the Niger and Benue; but the officers, discouraged by sickness, abandoned their original purpose, and the expedition proved another failure, involving a loss of at least sixty thousand pounds.

After the lapse of twelve years, it was ascertained that private steamers and sailing vessels were resorting to the Niger, and that an active trade was springing up in palm-oil, the trees producing which fringe the banks of the river for some hundreds of miles from the sea; and in 1853, a Liverpool merchant, McGregor Laird, who had accompanied the former expedition, fitted out, with the aid of government, the Pleiad steamer for a voyage up the Niger.

One would imagine that by this time the British government would have corrected their former errors; and a part were corrected.  The speed of this steamer surpassed that of her predecessors, and her draught did not exceed five feet.  She was well provided with officers, and a crew of native Kroomen from the coast; and she was supplied with ample stores of quinine.  But, singular as it may appear, this steamer, destined, to ascend the great rivers up which the former expedition found a strong breeze flowing daily, was not furnished with a sail; and although the banks of the