West African Studies - 1901 Author:Mary Henrietta Kingsley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS Concerning the perils that beset the navigator in the Baixos of St. Ann, with some description of the country be... more »tween the Sierra Leone and Cape Palmas and the reasons wherefrom it came to be called the Pepper, Grain, or Meleguetta Coast. It was late evening-time when the reached that part of the South Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick to see ten yards from the ship, so remembering certain captains who, under similar circumstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, he let go his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came. Slipperty slop, crash! slipperty slop, crash ! went all loose gear on board all night long ; and those of the passengers who went in for that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the admixture of the "solid malaria coming off the land." However, morning came at last, and even I was on deck as it dawned, and was rewarded for my unwonted activity by a vision of beautiful, definite earth-form dramatically unveiled. No longer was the ourCHAP, n FREETOWN HARBOUR 31 only material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great mass rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day, while another mass went leisurely away ...« less