Besides, there are three hulks converted from two old sailing ships and a steamer. Two of the hulks are used to warehouse bulk produce of palm-kernels and shea-nuts; the third holds coal. But the Company are building a new coal wharf of two tiers to enable the coal ships to discharge cargo direct into trucks. [Illustration: THE NIGER COMPANY’S WHARF AT BURUTU.] [Illustration: SHIPPING PALM-OIL For direct transit to Liverpool. (See page 348.)] Fifteen corrugated iron sheds, 90 feet by 30 feet, give accommodation on the wharf for goods which should not be left in the open, and also for the extensive engineering and carpenters’ workshops, under a white Superintendent Engineer, who has with him three European fitters, a boiler-maker, two shipwrights and a large body of skilled natives from Coast towns. A couple of slipways take the river craft for repair, from launches to steamers up to 700 tons. The coloured staff of fitters, blacksmiths, turners, moulders, and the rest of them are men from Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria. They serve apprenticeship in the Company’s engineering shops for five years. If their conduct has been satisfactory they will be graded as improvers. Next they may be drafted on a river boat as third engineers, rising to second or to chief engineer. Others may start on shore, either in the workshops or as house-boys. Should they wish it, and their behaviour be good, they go on the river steamers, commencing as stewards or deck hands and going through every stage, as quartermasters, boatswains, and mates, and rising to command the vessel, for, with the exception of three, all the stern-wheelers and small steamers are in the hands of black captains, and thoroughly capable they are. It was with such a “Cappy” I came from Baro to Lokoja. Burutu does not consist of only a long line of reclaimed beach and workshops abutting. There is much more. Hundreds of labourers are employed—400 on the commercial beach alone—and for them and others model villages have been laid out and the forest cleared for some distance back; for, previous to the Niger Company making Burutu its principal centre, the trees crowded down to the water edge, as they do at the opposite side of the river and at the ends of the nearly two miles of beach.