"I can with much truth say this of the river Congo, that by comparing it with other rivers, according to the best writers, it must rank as the third or fourth in magnitude. Considering the force of the current it produces in the sea, carrying out floating islands sixty or seventy leagues from the coast, the Amazon or Plata only can cope with it. Many traders, whom I met with at Embomma, (a settlement on the banks of the Congo distant thirty leagues from its mouth,) had come one month's journey down the river, which, reckoned at twenty miles each day (and they count them by the moon, _Gonda_), would make six hundred miles; and they spoke of it as equally large where they came from, and that it went by the name of _Enzaddi_, as it does among all the natives upon the coast. Should the shallow water, as laid down opposite Saenda, detract from the assumed size of the Congo, let it be remembered, that the river there is spread out ten miles in width, the middle channel of which has never been accurately sounded. It has long been my opinion that Leyland's or Molyneux Island at Embomma (either of which might be rendered as impregnable as Gibraltar at a very small expense) would be a choice station for establishing an extensive commerce with the interior of Africa. Indeed, if the idea of the Congo being the outlet of the Niger prove so upon trial, we may consider it as an opening designed by providence for exploring those vast regions, and civilizing the rude inhabitants." [Footnote: A chart of the Congo by Mr. Maxwell was published many years since by Laurie and Whittle, Fleet street.] Besides this account given by Mr. Maxwell, there are other testimonies to the magnitude of the Congo, shewing it to be a river of the first class, and larger probably than the Nile. In a journal (which the editor has seen) of an intelligent and respectable naval officer, Captain Scobell, who visited the coast of Africa in the year 1813, in H.M. sloop of war the Thais, the Congo is described as "an immense river from which issues a continued stream at the rate of four or five knots in the dry, and six or seven in the rainy season." In a subsequent passage he says, "In crossing this stream, I met several floating islands, or broken masses from the banks of that noble river, which, with the trees still erect, and the whole wafting to the motion of the sea, rushed far into the ocean, and formed a novel prospect even to persons accustomed to the phenomena of the waters." He adds, that there are soundings to the distance of from thirty or forty miles from the coast, arising probably from the vast quantity of alluvial matter brought down by the force of the stream. Other accounts state, that the waters of the Congo may be distinguished at sea more than thirty leagues from the coast, and that the water is fresh at the distance of thirty miles. [Footnote: Lopez, Merulla, and Dapper, referred to in Phillips's Voyages, vol. iii. p. 236.]