Historic Point Padrao, the “Mouta Seca,” or Dry Bush, of the modern Portuguese, showed no signs of hospitality.  The fierce rollers of the spumous sea broke and recoiled, foaming upon the sandy beach, which they veiled with a haze of water-dust, almost concealing the smoke that curled from the mangrove-hedged “King Antonio’s Town.”  Then, steaming to the north-east, we ran five miles to Turtle Cove, formerly Turtle Corner, a shallow bay, whose nearest point is “Twitty Twa Bush,” the baptismal effort of some English trader.  And now appeared the full gape of the Congo mouth, yawning seven sea-miles wide; the further shore trending to the north-west in a low blue line, where Moanda and Vista, small “shipping-ports” for slaves, were hardly visible in the hazy air.  As we passed the projecting tooth of Shark Point, a sandspit garnished with mangroves and dotted with palmyras, the land-squali flocked from their dirty-brown thatches to the beach, where flew the symbolic red flag.  Unlike most other settlements, which are so buried in almost impenetrable bush that the traveller may pass by within a few yards without other sign but the human voice, this den of thieves and wreckers, justly named in more ways than one, flaunts itself in the face of day.

The Congo disclaims a bore, but it has a very distinct bar, the angle pointing up stream, and the legs beginning about Bananal Bank (N.) and Alligator River (S.).  Here the great depth above and below (145 and 112 fathoms) shallows to 6-9.  Despite the five-knot current we were “courteously received into the embraces of the river;” H.M.  Steamship “Griffon” wanted no “commanding sea-breeze,” she found none of the difficulties which kept poor Tuckey’s “brute of a transport” drifting and driving for nearly a week before he could anchor off Fuma or Sherwood’s Creek, the “Medusa” of modern charts (?) and which made Shark Point, with its three-mile current, a “more redoubtable promontory than that of Good Hope was to early navigators.”  We stood boldly E.N.E. towards the high blue clump known as Bulambemba, and, with the dirty yellow breakers of Mwana Mazia Bank far to port, we turned north to French Point, and anchored in a safe bottom of seven fathoms.

Here we at once saw the origin of the popular opinion that the Congo has no delta.  On both sides, the old river valley, 32 miles broad, is marked out by grassy hills rolling about 200 feet high, trending from E.N.E. to W.S.W., and forming on the right bank an acute angle with the Ghats.  But, whilst the northern line approaches within five or six miles, the southern bank, which diverges about the place where “King Plonly’s town” appears in charts, sweeps away some seventeen miles down coast, and leaves a wide tract of mangrove swamps.  These, according to the Portuguese traders, who have their own plans of the river, extend some seventy miles south to Ambrizette:  slavers keep all such details very close, and doubtless for good reasons—­“short-cuts”