The company consists of traders, government officials and missionaries; and the captain is usually present. As our number diminishes at each successive port, we become better acquainted and more friendly. Men of antipodal differences are thus frequently brought into friendly and sympathetic relations, men who in ordinary life would seldom have been brought into contact with each other, and who never would have known that they had anything in common; and the experience is wholesome. I have learned to think more kindly of the African trader and to refrain from criticism because of some whom I have known intimately on these long voyages. As we sit on deck in the evening the captain tells us that at Lagos, where we are due in a few days, he has seen the natives fight the sharks in the sea and kill them. The shark is the monster of the tropical seas, the incarnation of ferocity and hunger. The native takes a stout stick, six inches long and sharpened at both ends. With his hand closed tight around this he dives into the sea, and as the shark comes at him with its terrible mouth open, he thrusts the stick upright into its mouth as far as he can. There it remains planted in the upper and lower jaws of the shark, which, not being able to close its mouth, soon drowns and comes to the surface. It is a good story, and not incredible as a fact; for the native is brave enough and fool enough to do this very thing. But this is the same captain who tells of fearful storms which he has successfully encountered, when the ship rolled until she took in water through the funnels. He remarked to me one day, speaking of one of his officers who was not the brightest: “I always have to verify his reckoning; for he always mistakes east for west and invariably puts latitude where longitude ought to be.” He also tells of an invitation he once received from a cannibal chief near Old Calabar, to come ashore and help him pick a missionary. He has seen the sea-serpent many a time and knows all about it. It is not dark green with brown stripes, as is generally supposed, but is bright yellow with blue spots, and is quite three hundred feet long. On one occasion it followed the captain’s ship for several days, at times raising one hundred and fifty feet of its length out of the water, and being prevented from helping itself to a sailor now and then only by great quantities of food which they threw over to it. This caused a famine on board, and they reached the nearest port in a half-starved condition. An affidavit goes with each of the captain’s stories. Most captains indulge in this entertaining hyperbole. Some are decidedly gifted with what has been called a “creative memory.” I have never yet known a captain who could not turn out as handsome a yarn as Gulliver.