* * * * *

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 Free State an organization which was quite strange to him.  When he landed at Banana, Captain Nilssen, pilot of the Lower Congo and Captain of the Port of Banana, gave him advice on the subject in language which was plain and unfettered.

“They are a lot of swine, these Belgians,” said Captain Nilssen, from his seat in the Madeira chair under the veranda of the pilotage, “and there’s mighty little to be got out of them.  Here am I, with a wife in Kjobnhavn and another in Baltimore, and I haven’t been able to get away to see either of them for five blessed years.  And mark you, I’m a man with luck, as luck goes in this hole.  I’ve been in the lower river pilot service all the time, and got the best pay,