West African studies Part 2

I will not enter into particulars about the customary white man's method of receiving a visit of Drivers, those methods being alike ineffective and accompanied by dreadful language. Barricading the house with a rim of red hot ashes, or a river of burning paraffin, merely adds to the inconvenience and endangers the establishment.

The native method with the Driver ant is different: one minute there will be peace in the simple African home, the heavy-scented hot night air broken only by the rhythmic snores and automatic side slaps of the family, accompanied outside by a chorus of cicadas and bull frogs. Enter the Driver--the next moment that night is thick with hurrying black forms, little and big, for the family, accompanied by rats, c.o.c.kroaches, snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and huge spiders animated by the one desire to get out of the visitors' way, fall helter skelter into the street, where they are joined by the rest of the inhabitants of the village, for the ants when they once start on a village usually make a regular house-to-house visitation. I mixed myself up once in a delightful knockabout farce near Kabinda, and possibly made the biggest fool of myself I ever did. I was in a little village, and out of a hut came the owner and his family and all the household parasites pell mell, leaving the Drivers in possession; but the mother and father of the family, when they recovered from this unwonted burst of activity, showed such a lively concern, and such unmistakable signs of anguish at having left something behind them in the hut, that I thought it must be the baby. Although not a family man myself, the idea of that innocent infant peris.h.i.+ng in such an appalling manner roused me to action, and I joined the frenzied group, crying, "Where him live?" "In him far corner for floor!" shrieked the distracted parents, and into that hut I charged.

Too true! There in the corner lay the poor little thing, a mere inert black ma.s.s, with hundreds of cruel Drivers already swarming upon it. To seize it and give it to the distracted mother was, as the reporter would say, "the work of an instant." She gave a cry of joy and dropped it instantly into a water barrel, where her husband held it down with a hoe, chuckling contentedly. s.h.i.+ver not, my friend, at the callousness of the Ethiopian; that there thing wasn't an infant--it was a ham!

These ants clear a house completely of all its owner's afflictions in the way of vermin, killing and eating all they can get hold of. They will also make short work of any meat they come across, but don't care about flour or biscuits. Like their patron Mephistopheles, however, they do not care for carrion, nor do they destroy furniture or stuffs. Indeed they are typically West African, namely, good and bad mixed. In a few hours they leave the house again on their march through the Ewigkeit, which they enliven with criminal proceedings. Yet in spite of the advantage they confer on humanity, I believe if the matter were put to the human vote, Africa would decide to do without the Driver ant.

Mankind has never been sufficiently grateful to its charwomen, like these insect equivalents, who do their tidying up at supremely inconvenient times. I remember an incident at one place in the Lower Congo where I had been informed that "cork fever" was epidemic in a severe form among the white population. I was returning to quarters from a beetle hunt, in pouring rain; it was as it often is, "the wet season,"

&c., when I saw a European gentleman about twenty yards from his comfortable-looking house seated on a chair, clad in a white cotton suit, umbrellaless, and with the water running off him as if he was in a douche bath. I had never seen a case of cork fever, but I had heard such marvellous and quaint tales of its symptoms that I thought--well, perhaps, anyhow, I would not open up conversation. To my remorse he said, as I pa.s.sed him, "Drivers." Inwardly apologising, I outwardly commiserated him, and we discoursed. It was on this occasion that I saw a mantis, who is by way of being a very pretty pirate on his own account, surrounded by a mob of the blind hurrying Drivers who, I may remark, always attack like Red Indians in open order. That mantis perfectly well knew his danger, but was as cool as a cuc.u.mber, keeping quite quiet and lifting his legs out of the way of the blind enemies around him. But the chances of keeping six legs going clear, for long, among such brutes without any of them happening on one, were small, even though he only kept three on the ground at one time. So, being a devotee of personal courage, I rescued him--whereupon he bit me for my pains.

Why didn't he fly? How can you fly, I should like to know, unless you have a jumping off place?

Drivers are indeed dreadful. I was at one place where there had been a white gentleman and a birthday party in the evening; he stumbled on his way home and went to sleep by the path side, and in the morning there was only a white gentleman's skeleton and clothes.

However, I will dwell no more on them now. Wretches that they are, they have even in spirit pursued me to England, causing a critic to observe that _brevi spatio interjecto_ is my only Latin, whereas the matter is this. I was once in distinguished society in West Africa that included other ladies. We had a distinguished native gentleman, who had had an European education, come to tea with us. The conversation turned on Drivers, for one of the ladies had the previous evening had her house invaded by them at midnight. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up a blanket, wrapped herself round with it, unfortunately allowed one corner thereof to trail, whereby it swept up Drivers, and awful scenes followed. Then our visitor gave us many reminiscences of his own, winding up with one wherein he observed "_brevi spatio interjecto_, ladies; off came my breeches."

After this we ladies all naturally used this phrase to describe rapid action.

There is another ant, which is commonly called the red Driver, but it is quite distinct from the above-mentioned black species. It is an unwholesome-looking, watery-red thing with long legs, and it abides among trees and bushes. An easy way of obtaining specimens of this ant is to go under a mango or other fruit tree and throw your cap at the fruit. You promptly get as many of these insects as the most ardent naturalist could desire, its bite being every bit as bad as that of the black Driver.

These red ones build nests with the leaves of the tree they reside on.

The leaves are stuck together with what looks like spiders' webs. I have seen these nests the size of an apple, and sent a large one to the British Museum, but I have been told of many larger nests than I have seen. These ants, unfortunately for me who share the taste, are particularly devoted to the fruit of the rubber vine, and also to that of a poisonous small-leaved creeping plant that bears the most disproportionately-sized spiny, viscid, yellow fruit. It is very difficult to come across specimens of either of these fruits that have not been eaten away by the red Driver.

It is a very fascinating thing to see the strange devices employed by many kinds of young seedlings and saplings to keep off these evidently unpopular tenants. They chiefly consist in having a sheath of exceedingly slippery surface round the lower part of the stem, which the ants slide off when they attempt to climb. I used to spend hours watching these affairs. You would see an ant dash for one of these protected stems as if he were a City man and his morning train on the point of starting from the top of the plant stem. He would get up half an inch or so because of the dust round the bottom helping him a bit, then, getting no holding-ground, off he would slip, and falling on his back, desperately kick himself right side up, and go at it again as if he had heard the bell go, only to meet with a similar rebuff. The plants are most forbearing teachers, and their behaviour in every way a credit to them. I hope that they may in time have a moral and educational effect on this overrated insect, enabling him to realise how wrong it is for him to force himself where he is not welcome; but a few more thousand years, I fear, will elapse before the ant is anything but a chuckleheaded, obstinate wretch. Nothing nowadays but his happening to fall off with his head in the direction of some other vegetable frees the slippery plant from his attempts. To this other something off he rushes, and if it happens to be a plant that does not mind him up he goes, and I have no doubt congratulates himself on having carried out his original intentions, understanding the world, not being the man to put up with nonsense and all that sort of thing, whereas it is the plant that manages him. Some plants don't mind ants knocking about among the grown-up leaves, but will not have them with the infants, and so cover their young stuff with a fur or down wherewith the ant can do nothing.

Others, again, keep him and feed him with sweetstuff so that he should keep off other enemies from its fruit, &c. But I have not s.p.a.ce to sing in full the high intelligence of West African vegetation, and I am no botanist; yet one cannot avoid being struck by it, it is so manifold and masterly.

Before closing these observations I must just mention that tiny, sandy-coloured abomination _Myriaica molesta_. In South West Africa it swarms, giving a quaint touch to domestic arrangements. No reckless putting down of basin, tin, or jam-pot there, least of all of the sugar-basin, unless the said sugar-basin is one of those commonly used in those parts, of rough, violet-coloured gla.s.s, with a similar lid.

Since I left South West Africa I have read some interesting observations of Sir John Lubbock's on the dislike of ants to violet colour. I wonder if the Portuguese of Angola observed it long ago and adopted violet gla.s.s for basins, or was it merely accidental and empirical. I suspect the latter, or they would use violet gla.s.s for other articles. As it is, everything eatable in a house there is completely insulated in water--moats of water with a dash of vinegar in it--to guard it from the ants from below; to guard from the ants from above, the same breed and not a bit better. Eatables are kept in swinging safes at the end of coir rope recently tarred. But when, in spite of these precautions, or from the neglect of them, you find, say your sugar, a brown, busy ma.s.s, just stand it in the full glare of the sun. Sun is a thing no ant likes, I believe, and it is particularly distasteful to ants with pale complexions; and so you can see them tear themselves away from their beloved sugar and clear off into a Hyde Park meeting smitten by a thunderstorm.

This kind of ant, or a nearly allied species, is found in houses in England, where it is supposed they have been imported from the Brazils or West Indies in 1828. Possibly the Brazils got it from South West Africa, with which they have had a trade since the sixteenth century, most of the Brazil slaves coming out of Congo. It is unlikely that the importation was the other way about; for exotic things, whether plants or animals, do not catch on in Western Africa as they do in Australia.

In the former land everything of the kind requires constant care to keep it going at all, and protect it from the terrific local circ.u.mstances.

It is no use saying to animal or vegetable, "there is room for all in Africa"--for Africa, that is Africa properly so called--Equatorial West Africa, is full up with its own stuff now, crowded and fighting an internecine battle with the most marvellous adaptations to its environment.

CHAPTER II

SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS

Concerning the perils that beset the navigator in the Baixos of St.

Ann, with some description of the country between the Sierra Leone and Cape Palmas and the reasons wherefrom it came to be called the Pepper, Grain, or Meleguetta Coast.

It was late evening-time when the ---- reached that part of the South Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick to see ten yards from the s.h.i.+p, so he, remembering certain captains who, under similar circ.u.mstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, let go his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came.

Slipperty slop, cras.h.!.+ slipperty slop, cras.h.!.+ went all loose gear on board all the night long; and those of the pa.s.sengers who went in for that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the admixture of the "solid malaria coming off the land."

However, morning came at last, and even I was on deck as it dawned, and was rewarded for my unwonted activity by a vision of beautiful, definite earth-form dramatically unveiled. No longer was the ---- our only material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great ma.s.s rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day, while another ma.s.s went leisurely away to the low Bullam sh.o.r.e, from whence it came again after sunset to join the mountain and the ocean mists as they drew down and in from the sea, helping them to wrap up Freetown, Sierra Leone and its lovely harbour for the night.

It was with a thrill of joy that I looked on Freetown harbour for the first time in my life. I knew the place so well. Yes; there were all the bays, Kru, English and Pirate; and the mountains, whose thunder rumbling caused Pedro do Centra to call the place Sierra Leona when he discovered it in 1462. And had not my old friend, Charles Johnson, writing in 1724, given me all manner of information about it during those delicious hours rescued from school books and dedicated to a most contentious study of _A General History of Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates_? That those bays away now on my right hand "were safe and convenient for cleaning and watering;" and so on and there rose up before my eyes a vision of the society ash.o.r.e here in 1724 that lived "very friendly with the natives--being thirty Englishmen in all; men who in some part of their lives had been either privateering, buccaneering, or pirating, and still retain and have the riots and humours common to that sort of life." Hard by, too, was Bence Island, where, according to Johnson, "there lives an old fellow named _Crackers_ (his true name he thinks fit to conceal), and who was formerly a noted buccaneer; he keeps the best house in the place, has two or three guns before his door with which he salutes his friends the pyrates when they put in, and lives a jovial life with them all the while they are there." Alas! no use to me was the careful list old Johnson had given me of the residents. They were all dead now, and I could not go ash.o.r.e and hunt up "Peter Brown" or "John Jones," who had "one long boat and an Irish young man." Social things were changed in Freetown, Sierra Leone; but only socially, for the old description of it is, as far as scenery goes, correct to-day, barring the town. Whether or no everything has changed for the better is not my business to discuss here, nor will I detain you with any description of the town, as I have already published one after several visits, with a better knowledge than I had on my first call there.

On one of my subsequent visits I fell in with Sierra Leone receiving a shock. We were sitting, after a warm and interesting morning spent going about the town talking trade, in the low long pleasant room belonging to the Coaling Company whose windows looked out over an eventful warehouse yard; for therein abode a large dog-faced baboon, who s.h.i.+ed stones and sticks at boys and any one who displeased him, pretty nearly as well as a Flints.h.i.+re man. Also in the yard were a large consignment of kola nuts packed as usual in native-made baskets, called bilys, lined inside with the large leaves of a Ficus and our host was explaining to my mariner companions their crimes towards this cargo while they defended themselves with spirit. It seemed that this precious product if not kept on deck made a point of heating and then going mildewed; while, if you did keep it on deck, either the First officer's minions went fooling about it with the hose, which made it swell up and burst and ruined it, or left it in unmitigated sun, which shrivelled it--and so on. This led, naturally, to a general conversation on cargo between the mariners and the merchants, during which some dreadful things were said about the way matches arrived, in West Africa and other things, s.h.i.+pped at s.h.i.+pper's own risk, let alone the way trade suffered by stowing hams next the boilers. Of course the other side was a complete denial of these accusations, but the affair was too vital for any of us to attend to a notorious member of the party who kept bothering us "to get up and look at something queer over King Tom."

Now it was market day in Freetown; and market day there has got more noise to the square inch in it than most things. You feel when you first meet it that if it were increased a little more it would pa.s.s beyond the grasp of human ear, like the screech of that whistle they show off at the Royal Society's Conversazione. However, on this occasion the market place sent up an entire compound yell, still audible, and we rose as one man as the portly housekeeper, followed by the small, but able steward, burst into the room, announcing in excited tones, "Oh! the town be took by locusts! The town be took by locusts!" (_D.C. fortissimo_). And we attended to the incident; ousting the reporter of "the queer thing over King Tom" from the window, and ignoring his "I told you so," because he hadn't.

This was the first cloud of locusts that had come right into the town in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, though they occasionally raid the country away to the North. I am informed that when the chiefs of the Western Soudan do not give sufficient gifts to the man who is locust king and has charge of them--keeping them in holes in the desert of Sahara--he lets them out in revenge. Certainly that year he let them out with a vengeance, for when I was next time down Coast in the Oil Rivers I was presented with specimens that had been caught in Old Calabar and kept as big curios.

This Freetown swarm came up over the wooded hills to the South-West in a brown cloud of singular structure, denser in some parts than others, continually changing its points of greatest density, like one of Thompson's diagrams of the ultimate structure of gases, for you could see the component atoms as they swept by. They were swirling round and round upwards-downwards like the eddying snowflakes in a winter's storm, and the whole air rustled with the beat of the locusts' wings. They hailed against the steep iron roofs of the store-houses, slid down it, many falling feet through the air before they recovered the use of their wings--the gutters were soon full of them--the ducks in the yard below were gobbling and squabbling over the layer now covering the ground, and the baboon chattered as he seized handfuls and pulled them to pieces.

Everybody took them with excitement, save the jack crows, who on their arrival were sitting sleeping on the roof ridge. They were horribly bored and bothered by the affair. Twice they flopped down and tried them. There they were lying about in gutters with a tempting garbagey look, but evidently the jack crows found them absolutely mawkish; so they went back to the roof ridge in a fuming rage, because the locusts battered against them and prevented them from sleeping.

We left Sierra Leone on the ---- late in the afternoon, and ran out again into the same misty wet weather. The next morning the balance of our pa.s.sengers were neither up early, nor lively when they were up; but to my surprise after what I had heard, no one had the much-prognosticated attack of fever. All day long we steamed onwards, pa.s.sing the Banana Isles and Sherboro Island and the sound usually called Sherboro River.[2] We being a South-West Coast boat, did not call at the trading settlements here, but kept on past Cape St. Ann for the Kru coast.

All day long the rain came down as if thousands of energetic--well, let us say--angels were hurriedly baling the waters above the firmament out into the ocean. Everything on board was reeking wet.

You could sweep the moisture off the cabin panelling with your hand, and our clothes were clammy and musty, and the towels too damp on their own account to dry you. Why none of us started specialising branchiae I do not know, but feel that would have been the proper sort of breathing apparatus for such an atmosphere.

The pa.s.sengers were all at the tail end of their spirits, for Sierra Leone is the definite beginning of the Coast to the out-goer. You are down there when you leave it outward bound; it is indeed, the complement of Canary. Those going up out of West Africa begin to get excited at Sierra Leone; those going down into West Africa, particularly when it is the wet season, begin to get depressed. It did not, however, operate in this manner on me. I had survived Sierra Leone, I had enjoyed it; why, therefore, not survive other places, and enjoy them? Moreover, my scientific training, combined with close study of the proper method of carrying on the local conversation, had by now enabled me to understand its true spirit,--never contradict, and, if you can, help it onward.

When going on deck about 6 o'clock that evening, I was alarmed to see our gallant captain in red velvet slippers. A few minutes later the chief officer burst on my affrighted gaze in red velvet slippers too. On my way hurriedly to the saloon I encountered the third officer similarly shod. When I recovered from these successive shocks, I carried out my mission of alarming the rest of the pa.s.sengers, who were in the saloon enjoying themselves peacefully, and reported what I had seen. The old coasters, even including the silent ones, agreed with me that we were as good as lost so far as this world went; and the deaf gentleman went hurriedly on deck, we think "to take the sun,"--it was a way he had at any time of day, because "he had been studying about how to fix points for the Government--and wished to keep himself in practice."

My fellow new-comers were perplexed; and one of them, a man who always made a point of resisting education, and who thought nothing of calling some of our instructor's best information "Tommy Rot!" said, "I don't see what can happen; we're right out at sea, and it's as calm as a millpond."

"Don't you, my young friend? don't you?" sadly said an old Coaster.

"Well, I'll just tell you there's precious little that can't happen, for we're among the shoals of St. Ann."

The new-comers went on deck "just to look round;" and as there was nothing to be seen but a superb specimen of damp darkness, they returned to the saloon, one of them bearing an old chart sheet which he had borrowed from the authorities. Now that chart was not rea.s.suring; the thing looked like an exhibition pattern of a prize shot gun, with the quant.i.ty of rocks marked down on it.

"Look here," said an anxious inquirer; "why are some of these rocks named after the Company's s.h.i.+ps?"

"Think," said the calm old Coaster.

"Oh, I say! hang it all, you don't mean to say they've been wrecked here? Anyhow, if they have they got off all right. How is it the 'Yoruba Rock' and the 'Gambia Rock?' The 'Yoruba' and the 'Gambia' are running now."

"Those," explains the old Coaster kindly, "were the old 'Yoruba' and 'Gambia.' The 'Bonny' that runs now isn't the old 'Bonny.' It's the way with most of them, isn't it?" he says, turning to a fellow old Coaster.

"Naturally," says his friend. "But this is the old original, you know, and it's just about time she wrote up her name on one of these tombstones." "You don't save s.h.i.+ps," he continues, for the instruction of the new-comers, attentive enough now; "that go on the Kru coast, and if you get ash.o.r.e you don't save the things you stand up in--the natives strip you."

"Cannibals!" I suggest.

"Oh, of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals, are natives down here when they get the chance. But, that does not matter; you see what I object to is being brought on board the next steamer that happens to call crowded with all sorts of people you know, and with a lady missionary or so among them, just with nothing on one but a flyaway native cloth. You remember D----?" "Well," says his friend. Strengthened by this support, he takes his turn at instructing the young critic, saying soothingly, "there, don't you worry; have a good dinner." (It was just being laid.) "For if you do get ash.o.r.e the food is something beastly. But, after all, what with the sharks and the surf and the cannibals, you know the chances are a thousand to one that the worst will come to the worst and you live to miss your trousers."

After dinner we new-comers went on deck to keep an eye on Providence, and I was called on to explain how the alarm had been given me by the footgear of the officers. I said, like all great discoveries, "it was founded on observation made in a scientific spirit." I had noticed that whenever a particularly difficult bit of navigation had to be done on our boat, red velvet slippers were always worn, as for instance, when running through the heavy weather we had met south of the Bay, on going in at Puerto de la Luz, and on rounding the Almadia reefs, and on entering Freetown harbour in fog. But never before had I seen more than one officer wearing them at a time, while tonight they were blazing like danger signals at the sh.o.r.e ends of all three.

My opinion as to the importance of these articles to navigation became further strengthened by subsequent observations in the Bights of Biafra and Benin. We picked up rivers in them, always wore them when crossing bars, and did these things on the whole successfully. But once I was on a vessel that was rash enough to go into a difficult river--Rio del Rey--without their aid. That vessel got stuck fast on a bank, and, as likely as not, would be sticking there now with her crew and pa.s.sengers mere mosquito-eaten skeletons, had not our First officer rushed to his cabin, put on red velvet slippers and gone out in a boat, energetically sounding around with a hand lead. Whereupon we got off, for clearly it was not by his sounding; it never amounted to more than two fathoms, while we required a good three-and-a-half. Yet that First officer, a truthful man, always, said n.o.body did a stroke of work on board that vessel bar himself; so I must leave the reader to escape if he can from believing it was the red velvet slippers that saved us, merely remarking that these invaluable nautical instruments were to be purchased at Hamburg, and were possibly only met with on boats that run to Hamburg and used by veterans of that fleet.

If you will look on the map, not mine, but one visible to the naked eye, you will see that the Coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas is the lower bend of the hump of Africa and the turning point into the Bights of Benin, Biafra and Panavia.

Its appearance gives the voyager his first sample of those stupendous sweeps of monotonous landscapes so characteristic of Africa. From Sherboro River to Cape Mount, viewed from the sea, every mile looks as like the next as peas in a pod, and should a cruel fate condemn you to live ash.o.r.e here in a factory you get so used to the eternal sameness that you automatically believe that nothing else but this sort of world, past, present, or future, can ever have existed: and that cities and mountains are but the memories of dreams. A more horrible life than a life in such a region for a man who never takes to it, it is impossible to conceive; for a man who does take to it, it is a kind of dream life, I am judging from the few men I have met who have been stationed here in the few isolated little factories that are established. Some of them look like haunted men, who, when they are among white men again, cling to their society: others are lazy, dreamy men, rather bored by it.

The kind of country that produces this effect must be exceedingly simple in make: it is not the mere isolation from fellow white men that does it--for example, the handful of men who are on the Ogowe do not get like this though many of them are equally lone men, yet they are bright and lively enough. Anyhow, exceedingly simple in make as is this region of Africa from Sherboro to Cape Mount, it consists of four different things in four long lines--lines that go away into eternity for as far as eye can see. There is the band of yellow sand on which your little factory is built. This band is walled to landwards by a wall of dark forest, mounted against the sky to seaward by a wall of white surf; beyond that there is the horizon-bounded ocean. Neither the forest wall nor surf wall changes enough to give any lively variety; they just run up and down a gamut of the same set of variations. In the light of brightest noon the forest wall stands dark against the dull blue sky, in the depth of the darkest night you can see it stand darker still, against the stars; on moonlight nights and on tornado nights, when you see the forest wall by the lightning light, it looks as if it had been done over with a coat of tar. The surf wall is equally consistent, it may be bad, or good as surf, but it's generally the former, which merely means it is a higher, broader wall, and more noisy, but it's the same sort of wall making the same sort of noise all the time. It is always white; in the sunlight, snowy white, suffused with a white mist wherein are little broken, quivering bits of rainbows. In the moonlight, it gleams with a whiteness there is in nothing else on earth. If you can imagine a non-transparent diamond wall, I think you will get some near idea to it, and even on the darkest of dark nights you can still see the surf wall clearly enough, for it shows like the ghost of its daylight self, seeming to have in it a light of its own, and you love or hate it.

Night and day and season changes pa.s.s over these things, like reflections in a mirror, without altering the mirror frame; but nothing comes that ever stills for one-half second the thunder of the surf-wall or makes it darker, or makes the forest-wall brighter than the rest of your world. Mind you, it is intensely beautiful, intensely soothing, intensely interesting if you can read it and you like it, but life for a man who cannot and does not is a living death.

But if you are seafaring there is no chance for a brooding melancholy to seize on you hereabouts, for you soon run along this bit of coast and see the sudden, beautiful headland of Cape Mount, which springs aloft in several rounded hills a thousand and odd feet above the sea and looking like an island. After pa.s.sing it, the land rapidly sinks again to the old level, for a stretch of another 46 miles or so when Cape Mesurado,[3] rising about 200 feet, seems from seaward to be another island.