Sir Joseph Banks had suggested a steamer drawing four feet, with twenty-four horse-power; an admirable idea, but practical difficulties of construction rendered the “Congo” useless.  Of the fifty-four white men, eighteen, including eleven of the “Congo” crew, died in less than three months.  Fourteen out of a party of thirty officers and men, who set out to explore the cataracts via the northern bank, lost their lives; and they were followed by four more on board the “Congo,” and one at Bahia.  The expedition remained in the river between July 6th and October 18th, little more than three months; yet twenty-one, or nearly one-third, three of the superior officers and all the scientific men, perished.  Captain Tuckey died of fatigue and exhaustion (Oct. 4th) rather than of disease; Lieutenant Hawkey, of fatal typhus (which during 1862 followed the yellow fever, in the Bonny and New Calabar Rivers); and Mr. Eyre, palpably of bilious remittent.  Professor Smith had been so charmed with the river, that he was with difficulty persuaded to return.  Prostrated four days afterwards by sickness on board the transport, he refused physic and food, because his stomach rejected bark, and, preferring cold water, he became delirious; apparently, he died of disappointment, popularly called a “broken heart.”  Messrs. Tudor and Cranchalso fell victims to bilious remittents, complicated, in the case of the latter, by the “gloomy view taken of Christianity by that sect denominated Methodists.”  Mr. Galway, on September 28th, visited Sangala, the highest rapid ("Narrative,” p. 328).  In the Introduction, p. 80, we are wrongly told that he went to Banza Ninga, whence, being taken ill on August 24th, he was sent down stream.  He, like his commander, had to sleep in the open, almost without food, and he also succumbed to fever, fatigue, and exhaustion.

The cause of this prodigious mortality appears in the records of the expedition.  Officers and men were all raw, unseasoned, and unacclimatized.  Captain Tuckey, an able navigator, the author of “Maritime Geography and Statistics,” had served in the tropics; his biographer, however, writes that a long imprisonment in France and “residence in India had broken down his constitution, and at the age of thirty (ob. aet. thirty-nine) his hair was grey and his head nearly bald.”  The men perished, exactly like the missionaries of old, by hard work, insufficient and innutritious food, physical exhaustion, and by the doctor.  At first “immediate bleeding and gentle cathartics” are found to be panaceas for mild fevers (p. 46):  presently the surgeon makes a discovery as follows:  “With regard to the treatment I shall here only observe that bleeding was particularly unsuccessful.  Cathartics were of the greatest utility, and calomel, so administered as speedily to induce copious salivation, generally procured a remission of all the violent symptoms.”  The phlebotomy was inherited from the missioners, who own almost to have blinded themselves by it.