With canoe packed, paddlers in position with their long spear-shaped paddles and musicians with their instruments, provisions piled high and carefully covered, the start is made. Farewells are shouted, and blessings pronounced which if measured by their volume should preserve the traveller for all time from hippos and snags, storms and mosquitos, sickness, accident and even death. [Sidenote: CANOE CHARACTERISTICS] One sees in the African canoe characteristics as distinct as those of the paddlers, for with a limited companionship comes a close acquaintance with nature and things inanimate. There is the leviathan among native craft shaped by the chief and his followers from a forest giant and bearing herself with the proud consciousness of regal ownership. In such a craft the passengers need have no fear for she rides majestically with her bows reared high, breasting the waves of the tornado-lashed river or lake, unmoved by the raging of the elements. She is seen at her best as she glides down stream under the combined influence of the current and the swinging impetus of her thirty stout paddlers. There is the rickety old canoe with broken stern and crippled sides, and her leaking bottom stuffed with clay, but there is life in her yet. She ships water fore and aft, and amidships too, soaking the traveller’s blankets and provisions, but her long experience gives her an ease in travel which her younger though stouter relatives cannot rival. Then there is the lumbering ungainly dug-out, with crooked nose and knotty sides, unreliable and ill-balanced, possessing an affinity for every submerged snag. “Hard on” she frequently goes and every effort to free her threatens to drown the occupants. Sandbanks she seeks out too and obstinately refuses to “jump” them. The paddlers will haul her off and curse her roundly for her crooked ways,—but as she was hewn so she will remain. At the other end of the scale is the tiny fishing dug-out of the Niger and the Congo, and their still smaller sister of Batanga in Spanish Guinea, the latter so small that the owner may with ease carry on his shoulder both canoe and fishing tackle, and whilst baiting hooks and catching fish he skilfully sits astride her and paddles with his feet. [Illustration: MRS. HARRIS CANOEING ON THE ARUWIMI, UPPER CONGO.] [Illustration: A RICKETY DUG-OUT.]