produce a plateful.  Manioc ripens between the sixth and ninth month, plantains and bananas once a year, cotton and rice in four months, and maize in forty days—­with irrigation it is easy to grow three annual crops.  The time for planting is before the rains, which here last six weeks to two months, September and October.  The staple of commerce is now the nguba, or ground-nut (plural, jinguba), which Merolla calls incumba, with sometimes a little milho (maize), and Calavance beans.  Of fruits we find trellised grapes, pines, and guavas, which, as at Fernando Po, are a weed.  The agrumi, limes, oranges and citrons are remarkably fine, and hold, as of old, a high place in the simple medicines of the country.  A cup of lime-leaf tea, drunk warm in the morning, is the favourite emetic and cathartic:  even in Pliny’s day we find “Malus Assyria, quam alii vocant medicam (Mediam?, venenis medetur” (xii. 7).  On the Gold Coast and in the Gaboon region, colic and dysentery are cured by a calabash full of lime-juice, “laced” with red pepper.  The peculiarity of European vegetables throughout maritime Congo and Angola is the absence of all flavour combined with the finest appearance; it seems as though something in the earth or atmosphere were wanting to their full development.  Similarly, though in the upper regions the climate is delicious, the missionaries could not keep themselves alive, but died of privation, hardship, and fatigue.

Chapter VIII.

A Visit to Banza Chisalla,

Boma, at the head of the Congo delta, the great depot between the interior and the coast, owes its existence wholly to

“the cruel trade
Which spoils unhappy Afric of her sons.”

Father Merolla (1682), who visited it from “Angoij,” our “Cabinda,” speaks of it as a pretty large island, tributary to the Mani-Congo, extremely populous, well supplied with provisions, and outlaid by islets belonging to the Count of Sonho.  Tuckey’s Embomma was an inland banza or town, and the site of the factories was called Market Point; the Expedition map and the hydrographic chart term it Loombee, the latter being properly the name of a large quitanda (market) lying two miles to the north-west.  Early in the present century it is described as a village of a hundred huts, opposite which trading vessels anchored under charge of the “Fuka or king’s merchant;” no market was held there, lest, in case of dispute, the royal person might suffer.  Although the main features of our maps are still correct, there have been great changes in the river-bed between Porto da Lenha and Boma, especially about the latter place, which should be transferred from its present site to Lumbi.  The broad Chisalla Creek, which Mr. Maxwell calls Logan, between the northern bank and the island “Booka Embomma,” is now an arm only 200 feet wide.  In fact all the bank about Boma, like the lower delta, urgently calls for re-surveying.