Just below Baro the Niger is 1,200 feet across, as smooth as the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park. The banks of the river are low, in some cases edged with narrow strips of sand and in others completely grass covered. As one steams down, the crowded trees make a wall to within a quarter of a mile of the bank, whilst in spots this thick wooding comes to the edge of the water and continues along it. Occasionally, in the background, are ranges of hills, giving a higher and less regular sky line. Clear and distinct on the sand beaches crocodiles can be seen at intervals snoozing in the sun. This broad river is not so easy for navigation as it looks, for there are plenty of shallows and submerged islands where our little craft might easily run aground. “Cappy,” therefore, does not take a direct line, but frequently has the boat in a diagonal course, as though he were tacking against the wind, giving directions by a slight move of the hand to the sailor at the wheel. Although no stop was made on the journey down, it was quite dark half-an-hour before arriving at Lokoja, where Mr A. Coombe, also a fellow-passenger on the voyage from England and District Agent of the Niger Company, was waiting on the beach with a lamp to guide “Cappy” to his moorings alongside the bank. Lokoja has a past. Not in the sense applied to Mrs Ebbsmith, but in the place it has occupied in the record of West African exploration. The story, even given briefly, may convey some notion of the climatic deterrents on the one hand and, on the other, how the British outlook on colonial expansion has changed—completely reversed—and how that policy was, it may be said, almost involuntarily effected. I do not propose, at least here, to take a literary jaunt along the 2,500 years since the Niger River was first mentioned by a writer, the worthy Herodotus. I merely venture to sail lightly over the 82 years that have elapsed since the course of the waterway was discovered by the brothers Lander. That is done by reason of the very important trading position Lokoja occupies and the dominating influence it has had in the political advancement of the country. The connection of Lokoja to the Niger is as strong as London is to the Thames or Liverpool to the Mersey, though the famous African town does not correspond topographically to either, for it is 337 miles from the sea. That part of the Niger was unknown to whites until the brothers Lander came down the stream in a canoe from Boussa and, continuing, traced the river to its outlet. Europeans had traded in the delta for hundreds of years but did not suspect it was the same stream Mungo Park and other travellers had struck in the hinterland.