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Updated: June 18, 2025
He was still thin and weak, but his spirits bubbled over, and his laughter was on tap, ready to be turned on any minute. He began to clamor for a move toward the coast, but Ned was obdurate and refused to stir for a week. Then one day Ned started out and paddled some miles toward the coast, examining the shores of the keys and the mangrove-lined banks of the salt-water rivers for a camping-ground.
Thus terminated our exploration in this neighbourhood; the result having been to give this part of the coast quite an insulated character. The sheets of water creating this new feature, although monotonous with their mangrove-lined shores, still conveyed us many miles into various parts of the continent that had never before been seen by a civilized being.
For whereas on the lower reaches of the Congo that is to say, for the first forty miles or so from its mouth the banks of the river are low and flat, and to a great extent mangrove-lined, beyond this point their tendency is to become higher and steeper, in some places, indeed, quite precipitous, until where we now were the ground sloped up from the river margin to a height of fully four hundred feet, for the most part densely covered with bush interspersed here and there with masses of noble forest trees.
It was not until 1830, when a move was made from the mangrove-lined shores of the Bay to the higher and more English country twelve miles inland at Waimate, that farming operations really began to succeed: then they prospered in marvellous fashion. On the whole, the "settlement" scheme was a failure. It was too high for average human nature.
The boatswain's pipe rang out, the men came tumbling up, and as fast as it could be achieved, the anchor was raised, sail after sail hoisted, and an hour after, with every scrap of canvas that could be set, the Nautilus was slowly gliding along right out to sea, with the palm and mangrove-lined shore slowly fading into the haze, while the men collected together in knots and discussed the possibility of catching a slaver that night.
Day after day we steadily pursued our course up the river, which, for the most part, retained the same dreary, monotonous aspect of low, bush- clad, mangrove-lined banks, and practically the same width, save where, at occasional intervals, it widened out and became dotted with islands, some of considerable size.
The change from the scene of wind-flecked blue sea, stately march of the swell, and thunderous roar and creaming froth of the breakers outside to the oil-smooth, mud-laden, strong-smelling river, with its tiny, swirling eddies here and there, its mangrove-lined banks, and its silence, through which the roar of the surf came to us over the intervening sand spit, mellowed and subdued by distance, was so marked that, although this was by no means my first experience of that kind of thing, I found myself rubbing my eyes as though I were by no means certain that I was awake; and I noticed others doing the same.
As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late Rich man had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination.
The strip of gorilla-country visited by me was an elevated line of clayey and sandy soil, cut by sweet-water streams, and by mangrove-lined swamps, backed inland by thin forest. Here the comparative absence of matted undergrowth makes the landscape sub-European, at least, by the side of the foul tropical jungle; it is exceptionally rich in the wild fruits required by the huge anthropoid.
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