At 5 P.M. our huge canvas drove us rapidly over the shoals and shallows of this imperfectly known sea:  the Ethiopic Directory justly grumbles, “It is a subject of regret that navigators who have had occasion to enter the Congo, and to remain there some time, have not furnished us with more information about the tides.”  This will be a work of labour and endurance; detached observations are of very little use.  We at once remarked the complication caused by the upper, surface, or freshwater current of 3 to 4 knots an hour, meeting the under, or oceanic inflow.  There is a short cut up Pirate’s Creek, but we avoided it for the usual reason, fear of finding it very long.  Passing a low point to port, subtended north and south by the Bananal River and Pirate’s Creek, after some six knots we were abreast of Bulambemba (the Boulem beembo of Tuckey’s Vocabulary).  It is interpreted “Answer,” hence our “Echo Point"(?); but others render it, “Hold your tongue.”  The former is correct, and the thick high screen of trees explains the native and English names.  Old writers call it Fathomless Point, which it is not now; a bank, the south-eastern projection of the great Mwana Mazia shoal, has formed a few feet below the surface; but the term will apply at the distance of a mile further south.  This acute angle shows a glorious clump, the “Tall Trees,” white mangroves rising a hundred feet, and red mangroves based upon pyramidal cages of roots; and beyond it the immediate shore is covered with a dense tropical vegetation, a tangle of bush, palms, and pandanus, matted with creepers and undergrowth, and rhyzophoras of many varieties delighting in brackish water.  We passed on the right the Ponta de Jacare (Point of the Crocodile), fronting Point Senegal on the other side.  The natives call the former Ngandu (li.  Jigandu), and farcical tales are told about it:  in the lower settlements Europeans will not go abroad by night without a lantern.  During my trip I sighted only one startled crocodile that floated log-like a mile off, and Captain Baak, of the Dutch house, had not seen one during a whole year at Banana Point.

We anchored for the night off the south side of the Zunga chya Ngombe, in Portuguese Ilha do Boi (Bullock), the Rhinoceros Island of our early charts.  It emerges from the waters of the right bank, a mere “ponton” plumed with dark mangroves and streaked with spar-like white trunks.  This is probably the “Island of Horses,” where the Portuguese, flying from the victorious Hollanders, were lodged and fed by the courteous Count of Sonho; perhaps it is Battel’s “Isle Calabes.”  The place is backed by the Monpanga or Mombang, the “Look-out Islands” of the chart, which has greatly changed since the beginning of the century; the dark mass of mangroves is now apparently part of the northern shore.  Almost due south of the Ilha do Boi is the Zunga chya Kampenzi, whence our word chimpanzee:  in the hydrographic chart it is miswritten Zoonga Campendi, and in Tuckey’s map, which