ten, her cabins scrubbed and aired, and the passengers mess
with the officers. So, of the ship's life, we acquired an intimate
knowledge, her interests became our own, and the necessity of
feeding her gaping holds with cargo was personal and acute. On a
transatlantic steamer, when once the hatches are down, the captain
need think only of navigation; on these coasters, the hatches never
are down, and the captain, that sort of captain dear to the heart of
the owners, is the man who fills the holds.

A skipper going ashore to drum up trade was a novel spectacle.
Imagine the captain of one of the Atlantic greyhounds prying among
the warehouses on West Street, demanding of the merchants:
"Anything going my way, this trip?" He would scorn to do it. Before
his passengers have passed the custom officers, he is in mufti, and
on his way to his villa on Brooklyn Heights, or to the Lambs Club,
and until the Blue Peter is again at the fore, little he cares for
passengers, mails, or cargo. But the captain of a "coaster" must be
sailor and trader, too. He is expected to navigate a coast, the
latest chart of which is dated somewhere near 1830, and at which the
waves rush in walls of spray, sometimes as high as a three-story
house. He must speak all the known languages of Europe, and all the
unknown tongues of innumerable black brothers. At each port he must
entertain out of his own pocket the agents of all the trading
houses, and, in his head, he must keep the market price, "when laid
down in Liverpool," of mahogany, copra, copal, rubber, palm oil, and
ivory. To see that the agent has not overlooked a few bags of ground
nuts, or a dozen puncheons of oil, he must go on shore and peer into
the compound of each factory, and on board he must keep peace
between the Kroo boys and the black deck passengers, and see that
the white passengers with a temperature of 105, do not drink more
than is good for them. At least, those are a few of the duties the
captains on the ships controlled by Sir Alfred Jones, who is Elder
and Dempster, are expected to perform. No wonder Sir Alfred is
popular.

Our first port of call was Landana, in Portuguese territory, but two
ships of the Woermann Line were there ahead of us and had gobbled up
all the freight. So we could but up anchor and proceed to
Libreville, formerly the capital of the French Congo. At five in the
morning by the light of a ship's lantern, we were paddled ashore to
drum up trade. We found t