Captain Hayes-Sadler, the Governor of Fashoda, was in command of the gunboat, and kindly offered to take me down to Khartoum. They told me that Captain Gage, Dr. Milne, Commandant Henri, Lieut. Bertrand, and Lieut. de Tonquedec had all passed about four days before. De Tonquedec, a most delightful and entertaining man, was the last Frenchman to evacuate the Nile. He had been sent up to supplement the occupation begun by Marchand, and had done by far the finest work of all. No undertaking has ever been more absurdly overrated than Marchand’s expedition to Fashoda. It was seized upon by the military party, and boomed to the echo as a set-off to the Dreyfusards. As a matter of fact, he never touched an inch of new country, but merely carried out successfully a very able bit of transport organization with everything in his favour--sound lieutenants, unlimited funds, and one of the best-equipped expeditions that ever set foot in Africa, supported by excellent native troops in his Senegalese. All the labour of the country was retained for him, and compulsion used where there was any difficulty in obtaining carriers. Hundreds of miles of navigable water took his goods almost to the Congo-Nile divide, and thence it was simply a question of moving from post to post till the watershed was crossed, and he could place his boats on the navigable waters of the Nile. The only real difficulty, that of reoccupying the Bahr-el-Ghazal posts, had been already accomplished by the Belgians, whom the French kicked out. Once on the navigable Nile, they had but to go with the current till they reached Fashoda; the waters of the Bahr-el-Ghazal and Lake No happening to be comparatively free from sudd obstructions. They were strong enough to defy resistance at the hands of the Shilluks, who have nothing but ambatch canoes, and once entrenched at Fashoda they would have been poor creatures if they could not have beaten off a handful of Dervishes. As an able example of African transport it stands in the van of similar undertakings, but as a daring or dangerous feat it does not stand in the same class as Gage and Milne’s descent of the Nile, or De Tonquedec’s performance. His duty was a most hazardous one, as, with nothing but a handful of Senegalese and a sous-officier, he penetrated overland through the terrible Dinkas to the Upper Nile, and occupied Gaba Shambeh. Marchand is a world-word. When I arrived at Marseilles and inquired after De Tonquedec, nobody had ever heard of him.