officers to Fashoda, on the White Nile. Here they were saved from possible destruction at the hands of a large force of Dervishes by Lord Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman. In consequence of the protests of the British Government, Major Marchand in November 1898 was instructed to leave Fashoda and retire through Abyssinia to French Somaliland. This journey up the valley of the Sobat River was successfully accomplished; and at the end of May 1899 Marchand and his officers reached Paris, where they received a great ovation. French interest in the Congo region began in the 18th century, mainly because of the importance of the servile labour of Congoland to the French West Indies and the desirability of preventing the Portuguese from regaining their monopolist hold over the Kongo kingdom and its commerce. The French Government contrived moreover to have French Catholic missionaries sent to the Congo and Loango in place of the Italian Capuchins. The Napoleonic Wars and the abolition of the slave trade suspended further action; but the idea of a French control over “Lower Guinea” revived in 1839, at the time when the government of Louis Philippe was making half-hearted efforts to found French settlements on the West Coast of Africa. At this date King ‘Denis’ of the Gaboon, who had shown favour to Roman Catholic missionaries and to French traders, was induced to transfer his kingdom to France. The Gaboon, or country of the Mpongwe tribes, lies to the south of the Cameroon region. Effective possession was not however taken till 1844, and Libreville, the present capital, was not founded till 1848, when a cargo of slaves was landed there from a captured slaving vessel and set free to commence the population of the new town. Attention was drawn to this French settlement by the remarkable journeys of a French-American, Paul du Chaillu, and his making definitely known the characteristics of the largest known anthropoid ape, the gorilla. The existence of this ape had been to some extent established by the American naturalist, Dr Savage, from skulls sent home by American missionaries settled on the Gaboon estuary; but the gorilla was scarcely made familiar to the general public, until Du Chaillu came to England with his specimens[129]. In the early sixties French explorers established the lower half of the course of the important river Ogowé; and in the seventies these explorations were extended by other travellers, who carried the knowledge of the Ogowé to the limits of its watershed, and passed beyond—unknowingly—to affluents of the Congo. Among these explorers was the celebrated Savorgnan de Brazza, of Dalmatian origin but born on a French ship off the coast of Brazil.