the Bay of Biscay, to rescue it from the dire confusion into which it had been thrown by an esteemed and able officer and a dutiful but inexperienced Purser caused them to regard me as only a very early visitor to Canary. Now they required explanation. I said I was interested in Natural History. "Botany," they said, "They had known some men who had come out from Kew, but they were all dead now."
I denied a connection with Kew, and in order to give an air of definiteness to my intentions, remembering I had been instructed that "one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is to be indefinite," I said I was interested in the South Antarctic Drift—I was in those days.
They promptly fell into the pit of error that this was a gold mine speculation, and said they had "never heard of such a mine." I attempted to extricate them from this idea, and succeeded, except with a deaf gentleman who kept on sweeping into the conversation with yarns and opinions on gold mines in West Africa and the awful mortality among people who attended to such things, which naturally led to a prolonged discussion ending in a general resolution that people who had anything to do with gold mines generally died rather quicker even than men from Kew. Indeed, it took me days to get myself explained, and when it was accomplished I found I had nearly got myself regarded as a lunatic to go to West Africa for such reasons. But fortunately for me, and for many others who have ventured into this kingdom, the West African merchants are good-hearted, hospitable English gentlemen, who seem to feel it their duty that no harm they can prevent should happen to any one; and my first friends, among them my fellow passengers on the ———, failing in inducing
