Our connection with the Gambia dates from 1588, in which year Queen Elizabeth granted a patent to some Exeter merchants to trade there. Thirty years later a company was formed for the purpose of carrying on this trade, which almost entirely consisted of “trafficking in black ivory,” as slave-dealing was euphonically termed. After the abolition of the slave-trade this settlement, in common with the others in West Africa, declined, and the colony was almost abandoned, until in 1816 a new mercantile company was formed by British traders from Senegal. A dependency of the Gambia is Bulama Island, which lies to the east at the mouth of the river Jeba, and where Captain Beaver established a settlement in 1791 at Dalrymple Bay. There used to be a small garrison kept up here under a subaltern officer, but after nine officers, in succession, had died at their post from the effects of the climate, the Government seemed to think the experiment had had a fair trial, and the troops were withdrawn. The Jeba river is unapproachable from the Gambia by land, as between the two lies the Casamanza river with its dense forests and swamps, and the inhabitants of that cheerful region are ferocious savages and cannibals. The Administrator of the Gambia exercises no jurisdiction of any description over the tribes dwelling in the vicinity of the British settlements. The Jolloffs are a musical race. Besides being the happy possessors of the tom-tom, or native drum, the six-stringed native banjo, and the long reed-instrument which seems universal in West Africa, they are the inventors of various musical machines peculiar to themselves. The most curious of these is one formed of slabs of a dark, heavy, and close-grained wood, which when struck emits musical sounds, varying in depth of tone according to the size and thickness of the piece of wood, the larger pieces giving forth bass notes and the smaller treble. These are arranged in regular order so as to form a complete gamut, and fastened above the halves of calabashes. It is in fact a native dulcimer, in which wood takes the place of glass. They have also a kind of kettledrum, in which the skin is stretched across half an enormous calabash, highly polished and sometimes elaborately carved. Another instrument is a species of zither, having ten strings, all of which are made of some vegetable fibre, though I have somewhere read that it is considered impossible to obtain strings suitable for stringed instruments from such a source. Some of their tunes are rather pleasing, though perhaps monotonous; but if, as some musicians assert, repetition may be considered a beauty, the Jolloffs may be well satisfied with their national music.