Wherever any dry land is found on the banks of these rivers, there are established native towns; and opposite these are moored the hulks in which the traders live. Some of these hulks have been fine vessels in their day, and all are very comfortably fitted up and roofed over: the finest is that of the African Steamship Company, the “Adriatic,” which formerly belonged to the White Star Company, and is now moored in Bonny river. Morning after morning the Europeans doomed to a wretched existence in these floating prisons wake up with a feeling of weariness and depression, and look out daily on the same muddy river with its banks of reeking ooze and interminable mangrove swamps. At night time the miasma creeps up from every creek and gradually enfolds all objects in a damp white shroud; while the croaking of the bull-frogs, the cry of a night-bird, and the lapping of the restless tide against the sides of the hulk, are the only sounds that break the oppressive silence. If ever a man were justified in seeking consolation from the flowing bowl it would be in these rivers, which used to be the habitat of the Palm Oil Ruffian, a creature that would not have been tolerated even in Alsatia; but the _genus_ is now rapidly dying out, and soon bids fair to be classed with the Plesiosaurus and other extinct reptiles. Death seems ever at hand, and here he does not appear, as in some parts of West Africa, clothed with sunlight and the beauties of tropical vegetation, but accompanied by all the imperfections of a sewer-like and miasmatic swamp. The natives of the Niger delta are, with the exception of the Boobies of Fernando Po, the most degraded and barbarous people found on the West Coast of Africa. They are nearly all cannibals, and devour the prisoners whom they capture in their internecine wars. The horrible climate influences even the aborigines, nearly every second man or woman one sees being covered with sores, or suffering from yaws, elephantiasis, or some equally loathsome disease; and their religious belief and fetish customs are tinged with the gloom which seems to settle over the whole delta.