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Updated: June 8, 2025
Whatever may have been the true nature of the affair, however, it had one good effect, it got us out of the Rembwe into the Gaboon, and although at the time this seemed a doubtful blessing, it made for progress. I had by this time mastered the main points of incapability in our craft. A. we could not go against the wind. B. we could not go against the tide.
The three, Gray Shirt, Silence, and Pagan quietly explained to me that they found the Rembwe price so little better than the Lembarene price that they would rather get their pay off Mr. Cockshut, than risk taking it back through the Fan country, so I gave them books on him. I gave all my remaining trade goods, and the rest of the rum to the Fans as a dash, and they were more than satisfied.
While we were in the Rembwe there was a state we will designate as C the tide coming one way, the wind another. With this state we could progress, backwards if the wind came up against us too strong, but seawards if it did not, and the tide was running down.
I gave a big dash to both chiefs, and they came out with us, most civilly, to the end of their first plantations; and then we took farewell of each other, with many expressions of hope on both sides that we should meet again, and many warnings from them about the dissolute and depraved character of the other towns we should pass through before we reached the Rembwe.
Shortly after passing through another plantation, we saw brown huts, and in a few minutes were standing in the middle of a ramshackle village, at the end of which, through a high stockade, with its gateway smeared with blood which hung in gouts, we saw our much longed for Rembwe River.
We have an addition to our crew this morning a man who wants to go and get work at John Holt's sub-factory away on the Rembwe. He has been waiting a long while at Arevooma, unable to get across, I am told, because the road is now stopped between Ayzingo and the Rembwe by "those fearful Fans." "How are we going to get through that way?" says I, with natural feminine alarm.
I sent Ngouta off to get me some tea, and had the hut cleared of an excited audience, and shut myself in with Hatton and Cookson's agent, and asked him seriously and anxiously if there was not a big factory of the firm's on the river, because it was self-evident he had not got anything like enough stuff to pay off my men with, and my agreement was to pay off on the Rembwe, hence my horror at the smallness of the firm's N'dorko store.
After listening to this young man, I really began to doubt that the Cities of the Plain had really been destroyed, and wondered whether some future revision committee will not put transported for destroyed. This young man certainly hit off the character of Sodom and Gomorrah to the life, in describing the towns towards the Rembwe, though he had never heard Sodom and Gomorrah named.
Well, yes, but where are there not drawbacks? The only drawbacks on those Rembwe nights were the series of horrid frights I got by steering on to tree shadows and thinking they were mud banks, or trees themselves, so black and solid did they seem.
For away to the north the 'Como and Boque and two other lesser, but considerable streams, were, with the Rembwe, pouring down their waters in swirling, intermingling, interclashing currents; and up against them, to make confusion worse confounded, came the tide, and the tide up the Gaboon is a swift strong thing, and irregular, and has a rise of eight feet at the springs, two-and-a-half at the neaps.
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