The island and station of St. Mary, Bathurst, of old a graveyard, now start up to starboard. The site was chosen apparently for its superior development of mud and mangrove, miasma and malaria. It is an island within an island. St. Mary the Greater is the northernmost of that mass of riverine holms and continental islands which, formed by the Cachéo and other great drains, extends south to the Rio Grande. Measuring some twenty miles from north to south, by six from east to west, it is embraced by the two arms of the Gambia delta, and is marked in old maps as the Combo, Forni, and Felúp country. St. Mary the Less, upon which stands the settlement facing east, is bounded eastward by the main mouth and westward by Oyster Creek, a lagoon-like branch: it is a mere sand-patch of twenty-one square miles, clothed by potent heats and flooding rains with a vivid and violent vegetation. Water is found everywhere three feet below the surface, but it is bad and brackish. There is hardly any versant or shed; in places the land sinks below the water-level; and, despite the excellent brick sewers, the showers prefer to sop and sod the soil. And, lest the island should be bodily carried away by man, there is a penalty for removing even a pailful of sand from the beach. Bathurst was unknown in the days of Mungo Park, when traders ran up stream to Jilifri, nearly opposite Fort James, and to Pisania, the end of river-navigation. St. Mary's Island, together with British Combo, Albreda, and the land called the 'Ceded,' or 'English Mile,' were bought from the Mandenga chief of the Combo province. First christened St. Leopold, and then Bathurst, after the minister of that name, the actual town owes its existence to an order issued by Sir Charles Macarthy. That ill-starred Governor of Sierra Leone (1814-24) is still remembered in Ashanti and on the Gold Coast: he is immortalised by a pestiferous island in the Upper Gambia well described by Winwood Reade. The settlement, designed for the use of liberated Africans, was built in 1816 by Lieutenant-Colonel Brereton and by Captain Alexander Grant. In 1821 it was made, like the Gold Coast, a dependency of Sierra Leone, whose jurisdiction, after the African Company was abolished in 1820, [Footnote: The first African Company was established by Queen Elizabeth, and in 1688 was allowed to trade with Guinea. The Royal African Company, or Guinea Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading to Africa, was incorporated under Charles II. on January 20, 1663. A third was patented on September 27, 1672. The 'African Company' (1722-24) was not allowed to interfere with 'interlopers.' On May 7,1820, it was abolished, after bankruptcy, and its possessions passed over to the Crown.]