By the time Everett reached the mouth of the Congo, he had learned that in everything he must depend upon himself; that he would be accepted only as the kind of man that, at the moment, he showed himself to be.  This attitude of independence was not chosen, but forced on him by the men with whom he came in contact.  Associations and traditions, that in every part of the United States had served as letters of introduction, and enabled strangers to identify and label him, were to the white men on the steamer and at the ports of call without meaning or value.  That he was an Everett of Boston conveyed little to those who had not heard even of Boston.  That he was the correspondent of Lowell’s Weekly meant less to those who did not know that Lowell’s Weekly existed.  And when, in confusion, he proffered his letter of credit, the very fact that it called for a thousand pounds was, in the eyes of a “Palm Oil Ruffian,” sufficient evidence that it had been forged or stolen.  He soon saw that solely as a white man was he accepted and made welcome.  That he was respectable, few believed, and no one cared.  To be taken at his face value, to be refused at the start the benefit of the doubt, was a novel sensation; and yet not unpleasant.  It was a relief not to be accepted only as Everett the Muckraker, as a professional reformer, as one holier than others.  It afforded his soul the same relaxation that his body received when, in his shirt-sleeves in the sweltering smoking-room, he drank beer with a chef de poste who had been thrice tried for murder.

Not only to every one was he a stranger, but to him everything was strange; so strange as to appear unreal.  This did not prevent him from at once recognizing those things that were not strange, such as corrupt officials, incompetence, mismanagement.  He did not need the missionaries to point out to him that the Independent State of the Congo was not a colony administered for the benefit of many, but a vast rubber plantation worked by slaves to fill the pockets of one man.  It was not in his work that Everett found himself confused.  It was in his attitude of mind toward almost every other question.

At first, when he could not make everything fit his rule of thumb, he excused the country tolerantly as a “topsy-turvy” land.  He wished to move and act quickly; to make others move quickly.  He did not understand that men who had sentenced themselves to exile for the official term of three years, or for life, measured time only by the date of their release.  When he learned that even a cablegram could not reach his home in less than eighteen days, that the missionaries to whom he brought letters were a three months’ journey from the coast and from each other, his impatience was chastened to wonder, and, later, to awe.

His education began at Matadi, where he waited until the river steamer was ready to start for Leopoldville.  Of the two places he was assured Matadi was the better, for the reason that if you still were in favor with the steward of the ship that brought you south, he might sell you a piece of ice.