While we were creeping along with all due caution, a fleet of canoes joined us from the right bank of the river, where Libreville now stands, with Qua-Ben, king of the right bank, and his suite, on board.  The chief boarded us, came and greeted me, and then with a self-important air, established himself, accompanied by the whole of his suite, on the poop of my frigate.  He was a small deformed man, with a countenance betraying all the spitefulness usual among dwarfs and humpbacked people.  He was huddled into a British naval officer’s uniform.  Taken up as I was with the management of my ship, I paid no attention at all to him.  Presently a top man just come down out of the mizzentop approached me and whispered, “Captain, that king is an awful rascal.  I was here last year with a ship from Nantes, and he stripped us of everything.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“Perfectly, sir, it’s Qua-Ben.  I know him quite well”

“Very good, call the master-at-arms...Master-at-arms, take that king over there, and put him in irons!”

Four pairs of sinewy arms lifted up his sable majesty, under the orders of the master-at-arms, the police officer of the ship, and thus carried, and followed by his dismayed attendants, the king disappeared below.  He yelled like a dog who has had his paw trodden on, and I fancied I heard the words “Bouet!  Bouet!” here and there.  That was indeed the name he was invoking.  When he had once been laid out on his plank couch, we extracted a complete confession of his misdeeds through the medium of several interpreters, and we learnt also the fact, which a summary investigation confirmed, that Commander Bouet had already chastised him and made him disgorge his plunder once.  So I had him set at liberty, and advised him to meditate on his second warning, and behave accordingly for the future.

He lost no time in taking himself off, while the Belle-Poule cast anchor near the left bank of the river, before a town belonging to another native king known as Denis.  This Denis was by no means an ordinary individual.  Some of his predecessors, too, had been illustrious in their way.  His father, who had been kidnapped when very young and taken to Europe, had played the Chinese bells in a military band under the first Napoleon’s empire, had returned to his own country, and had finally been called to the highest place in the State.  His son had inherited his father’s honours.  He was a fine-looking negro, with grizzled woolly pate, who spoke French fairly well, and seemed much inclined to come to an understanding with us and open up his country to trade and civilisation.  He came to call on me in great state, dressed in the handsome uniform of a general of the French Republic, the cast-off garments of some performer at the Cirque Olympique.  He had a tricolour plume in his hat, a gold laced coat with lapels turned back on the chest, white breeches, and top boots.  He wore the decoration of the Legion of Honour, which he had been given for