The original Padrao was destroyed by the Dutch in 1645, an act of barbarism which is justly called “Vandalica facanha.”  Father Merolla says (1682), “The Hollanders, out of envy, broke the fine marble cross to pieces; nevertheless, so much remained of it, when I was there, as to discover plainly the Portuguese arms on the ruins of the basis, with an inscription under them in Gothic characters, though not easy to be read.”  In 1859 a new one was placed in Turtle Cove, a few yards south-west of Shark Point; but the record was swept away by an unusually high tide, and no further attempt has been made.

We were then led down a sandy narrow line in the bush, striking south-east, and, after a few yards, we stood before two pieces of marble in a sandy hollow.  The tropical climate, more adverse than that of London, had bleached and marked them till they looked like pitted chalk:  the larger stump, about two feet high, was bandaged, as if after amputation, with cloths of many colours, and the other fragment lay at its feet.  Tom Peter, in a fearful lingua-Franca, Negro-Anglo-Portuguese, told us that his people still venerated the place as part of a religious building; it is probably the remnant thus alluded to by Lopes de Lima (iii. 1-6):  “Behind this point (Padrao) is another monument of the piety of our monarchs, and of the holy objects which guided them to the conquest of Guinea, a Capuchin convent intended to convert the negroes of Sonho; it has long been deserted, and is still so.  Even in A.D. 1814, D. Garcia V., the king of Congo, complained in a letter to our sovereign of the want of missionaries.”  Possibly the ruined convent is the church which we shall presently visit.  Striking eastward, we soon came to a pool in the bush sufficiently curious and out of place to make the natives hold it “Fetish;” they declare that it is full of fish, but it kills all men who enter it—­“all men” would not include white men.  Possibly it is an old piscina; according to the Abbe Proyart, the missionaries taught the art of pisciculture near the village of Kilonga, where they formed their first establishment.  The place is marked “Salt-pond” in Barbot, who tells us that the condiment was made there and carried inland.

A short walk to a tall tree backing the village showed us, amongst twenty-five European graves, five tombs or cenotaphs of English naval officers, amongst whom two fell victims to mangrove-oysters, and the rest to the deadly “calenture” of the lower Congo.  We entered the foul mass of huts,

                    “Domus non ullo robore fulta
          Sed sterili junco cannaque intecta palustri.”

It was too early for the daily debauch of palm wine, and the interiors reeked with the odours of nocturnal palm oil.  The older travellers were certainly not blases; they seemed to find pleasure and beauty wherever they looked:  Ca da Mosto (1455), visiting the Senegal, detected in this graveolent substance, fit only for wheel-axles, a threefold property, that of smelling like violets, of tasting like oil of olives, and tinging victuals like saffron, with a colour still finer.  Even Mungo Park preferred the rancid tallow-like shea butter to the best product of the cow.  We chatted with the Shark Point wreckers, and found that they thought like Arthegal,