When last Mrs. Davis and I made that voyage from Southampton, the decks were crowded chiefly with those English whose faces are familiar at the Savoy and the Ritz, and who, within an hour, had settled down to seventeen days of uninterrupted bridge, with, before them, the prospect on landing of the luxury of the Mount Nelson and the hospitalities of Government House.  When, the other day, we again left Southampton, that former departure came back in strange contrast.  It emphasized that this time we are not accompanying civilization on one of her flying leaps.  Instead, now, we are going down to the sea in ships with the vortrekkers of civilization, those who are making the ways straight; who, in a few weeks, will be leaving us to lose themselves in great forests, who clear the paths of noisome jungles where the sun seldom penetrates, who sit in sun-baked “factories,” as they call their trading houses, measuring life by steamer days, who preach the Gospel to the cannibals of the Congo, whose voices are the voices of those calling in the wilderness.

As our tender came alongside the Bruxellesville at Southampton, we saw at the winch Kroo boys of the Ivory Coast; leaning over the rail the Soeurs Blanches of the Congo, robed, although the cold was bitter and the decks black with soot-stained snow, all in white; missionaries with long beards, a bishop in a purple biretta, and innumerable Belgian officers shivering in their cloaks and wearing the blue ribbon and silver star that tells of three years of service along the Equator.  This time our fellow passengers are no pleasure-seekers, no Cook’s tourists sailing south to avoid a rigorous winter.  They have squeezed the last minute out of their leave, and they are going back to the station, to the factory, to the mission, to the barracks.  They call themselves “Coasters,” and they inhabit a world all to themselves.  In square miles, it is a very big world, but it is one of those places civilization has skipped.

Nearly every one of our passengers from Antwerp or Southampton knows that if he keeps his contract, and does not die, it will be three years before he again sees his home.  So our departure was not enlivening, and, in the smoking-room, the exiles prepared us for lonely ports of call, for sickening heat, for swarming multitudes of blacks.

In consequence, when we passed Finisterre, Spain, which from New York seems almost a foreign country, was a near neighbor, a dear friend.  And the Island of Teneriffe was an anticlimax.  It was as though by a trick of the compass we had been sailing southwest and were entering the friendly harbor of Ponce or Havana.