His travel through the black heart of this black continent may have been paralleled by that of other obscure heroes who voyaged from grim necessity and not for advertisement, but the history of it, as it was told me in his simple log-book style, far surpasses the wonder of any of those travels which find a place in published volumes.  He had started, a completely destitute man, from a spot far up on the Haut Congo, amidst treacherous hostile population.  He had not a friend in Africa, black or white.  He had no resources save his tongue, his thews, an empty revolver, and his mother wit, and yet he had won a slow way down to the western seaboard through a hundred hostile tribes, where an army would have been eaten up, and a Marco Polo might well have failed.

It would suit my pleasure finely to write of this terrific journey, with its dangers, its finesses, and its infinite escapes; it would gratify me to the quick if I might belaud to the full of my appreciation the endurance, and the grand resourcefulness, of this little sailor cast so desperately out of his more native element; but the account of the travel is reserved for the pen of Captain Kettle himself, and so the more professional scribe may not poach upon his territory.

I had it from his own lips that the perils of the way made him see the poetry of it all, and he said to himself that here was the theme for that great epic, which would be the chef d’oeuvre of his literary life.  It is to be written in blank verse, with the hymns and secular songs he sang at each stop given in an appendix, and he confidently hopes that it will stand out as something conspicuous and distinct against the sombre background of prosaic travel books.

His arrival at the coast was an achievement that made him almost faint with joy.  Xenophon and his ten thousand Greeks hailed the sea, we are told, with a mighty shout.  But to them Thalassa was merely a way-mark, a sign that they were nearing home.  To Kettle it was more, far more, although he could not define the relationship.  He had dwelt upon the sea the greater part of his days; he had got his meagre living from her; and although at all times she had been infinitely hard and cruel to him, and he had cursed her day in and day out with all a seaman’s point and fluency, she had wrapped herself into his being in a way he little guessed, till separation showed him the truth.

He had seen the glint of her through the trees as he entered this last village of his march, but the air was too dull with heat for him to catch so much as a whiff of her refreshing saltness, and for the present he could not go down to greet her.  He was still the lonely troubadour, dressed in a native cloth around the loins, with a turban of rags upon his head, and a battered accordion slung from his back, come in from afar to sing and pull faces for a dinner.