France has more good harbours on the coasts of Africa than all the other nations put together. Algiers, with one of the finest roadsteads in the world, is now the most important coaling-station in the Mediterranean and a port of call for nearly all of the lines plying between America and the Near East; by the construction of a great ship-canal the French engineers have made Tunis directly accessible to ocean-going vessels, thus restoring the maritime importance of Carthage to her successor; with Tangier under French control, a naval base will doubtless eventually be constructed there which will rival Toulon and will divide with Gibraltar the control of the entrance to the Mediterranean. With its entire western portion dominated by the great French ports of Villefranche, Toulon, Ajaccio, Marseilles, Oran, Algiers, and Bizerta, the Mediterranean is well on the road to becoming, as Napoleon once prophesied, a French lake. But, though good harbours are taken rather as a matter of course in the Mediterranean, one hardly expects to find them on the reef-bordered West Coast, which is pounded by a ceaseless and merciless surf. At all of the British, German, Spanish, and Portuguese ports in West Africa, save one, you are lowered from the steamer's heaving deck into a dancing surf-boat by means of a contrivance called the “mammy chair,” and are taken ashore by a score of ebony giants who ply their trident-shaped paddles madly in their desperate efforts to prevent your being capsized. Alternately scorched by the sun and soaked by the waves, you are landed, about three times out of four, on a beach as hot as though of molten brass. The fourth time, however, your Kroo boys are not quite quick enough to escape the crest of one of those mighty combers—and you can thank your lucky stars if you get ashore at all. This is the method by which every passenger and every bale of merchandise is landed on the West Coast and it is very dangerous and unpleasant and costly. But when you come to the French port of Dakar, instead of being dangled between sea and sky in a bo's'n's chair and dropped sprawling into the bottom of a pitching surf-boat, and being paddled frantically ashore by a crew of perspiring negroes, you lounge in a cane chair on an awning-covered deck while your vessel steams grandly in, straight alongside a concrete wharf which would do credit to the Hudson River, and a steam crane dips down into the hold and lifts the cargo out, a dozen tons at a time, and loads it on a waiting train to be transported into the heart of Africa, and as you lean over the rail, marvelling at the modernity and efficiency which characterise everything in sight, you wonder if you are really in the Dark Continent, or if you are back in America again.