begins with De Cintra, who came in search of slaves, and instead
gave the place its name. Because of the roaring of the wind around
the peak that rises over the harbor he called it the Lion Mountain.

After the fifteenth century, in a succession of failures, five
different companies of "Royal Adventurers" were chartered to trade
with her people, and, when convenient, to kidnap them; pirates in
turn kidnapped the British governor, the French and Dutch were
always at war with the settlement, and native raids, epidemics, and
fevers were continuous. The history of Sierra Leone is the history
of every other colony along the West Coast, with the difference that
it became a colony by purchase, and was not, as were the others, a
trading station gradually converted into a colony. During the war in
America, Great Britain offered freedom to all slaves that would
fight for her, and, after the war, these freed slaves were conveyed
on ships of war to London, where they were soon destitute. They
appealed to the great friend of the slave in those days, Granville
Sharp, and he with others shipped them to Sierra Leone, to
establish, with the aid of some white emigrants, an independent
colony, which was to be a refuge and sanctuary for others like
themselves. Liberia, which was the gift of philanthropists of
Baltimore to American freed slaves, was, no doubt, inspired by this
earlier effort. The colony became a refuge for slaves from every
part of the Coast, the West Indies and Nova Scotia, and to-day in
that one colony there are spoken sixty different coast dialects and
those of the hinterland.

Sierra Leone, as originally purchased in 1786, consisted of twenty
square miles, for which among other articles of equal value King
Naimbanna received a "crimson satin embroidered waistcoat, one
puncheon of rum, ten pounds of beads, two cheeses, one box of
smoking pipes, a mock diamond ring, and a tierce of pork."

What first impressed me about Sierra Leone was the heat. It does not
permit one to give his attention wholly to anything else. I always
have maintained that the hottest place on earth is New York, and I
have been in other places with more than a local reputation for
heat; some along the Equator, Lourenco Marquez, which is only
prevented from being an earthen oven because it is a swamp; the Red
Sea, with a following breeze, and from both shores the baked heat of
the desert, and Nagasaki, on a rainy day in midsummer.

But New York in