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236
EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA
chap.

captors, Hanno kept their skins to hang up in the Temple of Juno on his return home, evidently intending to be complimentary both to the Goddess and the Gorillae; but it is to be feared neither of them took it as it was meant, for Hanno had no luck from the Gods after this, having to turn back from shortness of provisions, and finally ending his career by, some say, being killed, and others say exiled from Carthage on account of his having a lion so tame that it would carry baggage for him; Punic public opinion held that this demonstrated him to be a man dangerous to the State. The Gorillae seem to have worked out their vengeance on white men by making it more than any man's character for truth is worth to see one of them—except stuffed in a museum, with a label on.

How far Hanno really went down South is not known with any certainty. M. Gosselin held he only reached the River Nun, on the Moroccoan coast. Major Rennell fixed his furthest point somewhere north of Sierra Leone, and held the Island of the Gorillae to be identical with the Island of Sherboro'. Bougainville believed that he at any rate went well into the Bight of Benin, while others think he went at any rate as far as Gaboon. I cannot myself see why he should not have done so, considering the winds and tides of the locality and the time taken; indeed, I should be quite willing to believe he went down to Congo, and that in the most terrific of the fires he witnessed an eruption of the volcanic peak of Cameroon, a volcano not yet extinct. Indeed the name given to this high fire "that almost reached the stars" by his interpreters―the Chariot of the Gods—is not so very unlike the name the Cameroon Peak bears to this day, Mungo Mah Lobeh, the Throne or Place of Thunder, and