they said it was one of the channels of the Niger River. Then, I argued
in my bookish way, Port Duluth must be in Nigeria. But this wasn't so
certain at all. I became acquainted with the ragged edge of the British
Empire. I gathered that the boundaries were not entirely settled, but
that when the railway was carried along some watershed into the
interior, it would link up with another system and our sphere of
influence would automatically extend to include Port Duluth. And when I
kept on at my shipmates and wanted to know what made the sphere of
influence so very precious I received the staggering answer that it was
nuts. We were building battle-ships and recruiting armies and building
railways and bridges and harbours, for nuts. To me, walking to and fro
on the after-deck in the glow of a tropical sunset, it seemed absurd.
You see, I knew nothing of raw products. Until I went to sea I didn't
know how far the common things come. I didn't know that Yorkshire
pig-iron was smelted from Tunisian and Ionian ore, or that the sugar in
my tea had gone from Java to New York and from there to Liverpool. I
didn't know where things came from nor where they went. The geography at
school had some of it no doubt. I can recall some few vague facts about
flax at Belfast and jute at Dundee. Humph! That trip to Port Duluth was
worth a million geography lessons.

"To begin with, I learned much about rivers. In England a river is
something easily comprehended. You can see along it, and across it, and
it is locked, bolted and barred with towns and bridges and weirs and
tow-paths. It is no more like an African river than a tame cat is like a
leopard. Yet on the map the only difference is that perhaps the large
river will have two mouths, and several tributaries running into it,
exactly like a branch running into a tree. It wasn't like that at all. I
had an atlas with me and when we reached the mouths of the great river I
tried to find out where we were on the map. But it was hopeless. Where
the map showed one channel there were hundreds on the chart. And the
chart was out-of-date. It seemed a dream to me. I was under the
impression that navigation nowadays was a humdrum affair of making
points, steering on a ruled pencil line on the chart, so much for
currents, so much for tides and so on. So it is, no doubt, in a great
measure; but we can hardly realize how much of it is sheer skill and
gallant daring. Even the men who do it don't realize i