During my stay at Glass Town I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of the Rev. Messrs. Walker and Preston, of the Baraka Mission.  The head-quarter station of the American Board of Foreign (Presbyterian) Missions was established on the Gaboon River in 1842 by the Rev. J. Leighton Wilson, afterwards one of the secretaries to the Society in New York.  He had left the best of memories in “the River,” and there were tales of his having manumitted in the Southern United States a small fortune of slaves without a shade of compulsion.  His volume on West Africa, to which allusion has so often been made, contains a good bird’s-eye of the inter-tropical coast, and might, with order, arrangement, and correction of a host of minor inaccuracies, become a standard work.

I have already expressed my opinion, founded upon a sufficiently long experience, that the United States missionary is by far the best man for the Western Coast, and, indeed, for dangerous tropical countries generally.  Physically he is spare and hard, the nervous temperament being more strongly developed in him than in the bulbous and more bilious or sanguine European.  He is better born, and blood never fails to tell.  Again, he generally adopts the profession from taste, not because il faut vivre.  He is better bred; he knows the negro from his childhood, and his education is more practical, more generally useful than that of his rivals.  Moreover, I never yet heard him exclaim, “Capting, them heggs is ’igh!” Lastly he is more temperate and moderate in his diet:  hitherto it has not been my fate to assist in carrying him to bed.

Perhaps the American missionary carries sobriety too far.  In dangerous tropical regions, where there is little appetite and less nutritious diet, where exertion of mind and body easily exhaust vitality, and where “diffusible stimulants” must often take the place of solids, he dies first who drinks water.  The second is the man who begins with an “eye-opener” of “brandy-pawnee,” and who keeps up excitement by the same means through the day.  The third is the hygienic sciolist, who drinks on principle poor “Gladstone” and thin French wines, cheap and nasty; and the survivor is the man who enjoys a quantum suff. of humming Scotch and Burton ales, sherry, Madeira, and port, with a modicum of cognac.  This has been my plan in the tropics from the beginning, when it was suggested to me by the simplest exercise of the reasoning faculties.  “A dozen of good port will soon set you up!” said the surgeon to me after fever.  Then why not drink port before the fever?

I have said something upon this subject in “Zanzibar City, Island, and Coast” (i. p. 180), it will bear repetition.  Joseph Dupuis justly remarks:  “I am satisfied, from my own experience, that many fall victims from the adoption of a course of training improperly termed prudential; viz. a sudden change of diet from ship’s fare to a scanty sustenance of vegetable matter (rejecting even a moderate proportion of wine), and seclusion in their apartments from the sun and atmosphere.”