As for me, while Aumale was steaming towards Algeria I was bidding farewell to my excellent friends and relatives, Queen Dona Maria and King Ferdinand, and setting sail for Senegal and the Guinea Coast, where I was to make the round of our colonial settlements.

CHAPTER X

1843

The canoe manned by four paddlers in which I had crossed the bar at Guet-n-dar was carried high up on the sand on the crest of a huge wave.  A crowd of blacks rushed forward before the wave could come back, lifted me out, and put me down, with loud shouts of “Petit roi pas goutte d’eau " (Not a drop of water on our little king), at the feet of Bobokar, King of Guet-n-dar, a tall negro, dressed in a striped cotton gown, and with a laced cocked hat on his head, which had seen better days on a general officer’s or a coachman’s.

As soon as I was landed, the King of Guet-n-dar (I only call him king in obedience to the African custom which bestows the title on every chief who has a right to beat other people)—­the King, I say, set himself to work to make way for me through his subjects crowding round, with heavy blows from his cudgel, and crossing the tongue of sand between the Senegal river and the sea, which forms his kingdom, I entered St. Louis, the capital of our possessions on the West African coast.  While nobody talks anything but sugar at Martinique, nor cod in Newfoundland, at St. Louis the only subject of conversation is gum.  It is its staple product, and indeed is found nowhere else, except in Arabia.

The gum forests are in country belonging to the Arabs, on the right bank of the Senegal river, and are consequently in the hands of the Moors, who carry the produce to the river.  The various stations we have established along its course are intended for the protection of the traders or coloured agents, acting as intermediaries between the natives, and the white merchants, unable themselves to face the deadly climate, and also to close the road to the British markets on the Gambia river to the Moors.  To the garrisons of these stations, regular charnel-houses, our officers and men come out to die, or else to catch the germ of some incurable illness.  I learn that nowadays, by dint of using quinine as a preventive, and of improvements in some other respects, the effects of the unhealthy climate have been somewhat reduced, but when I was there the condition of things was really terrible.  So my first care, when I reached St. Louis, was to go and see the victims of duty in the hospital into which they were crowded, and my heart swelled at the sight of all the poor yellow wasted faces many of them already bearing the signs of approaching dissolution.  Poor brave fellows!  How I wished I had crosses to pin on all their breasts, to soften the last moments of the life they had given for their country, by a sign of its remembrance of them!  But I had not one, and I could not help feeling furious at the thought