It was not on the voyage to Batanga, but on subsequent voyages along the lower coast, to the Congo, to St. Paul de Loanda and Benguela, that I was fully impressed with the service of the black man to the white and the disposition to cruelty on the part of the latter. For it is south of Batanga that the natives employed on the steamer do their hardest work. What I saw and heard on those several voyages gave ample food for reflection upon the moral danger of unrestrained authority and the unfitness of most men to govern their fellows of lower degree. I was allowed to remain absorbed in my own thoughts as there were but few passengers on board; on one such journey I was the only passenger for three weeks out of five. After leaving Sierra Leone on the outward voyage the course changes eastward. A few days later we sighted the coast of Liberia and nearly opposite Monrovia we anchored and waited for eighty black men who were shipped as workmen for the rest of the voyage. We anchored far out at sea; for the Liberian coast is very rough and dangerous, and for most of the entire coast the latest charts are more than fifty years old. These workmen belong to the Kru tribe. They do all the work of discharging and taking on cargo for the entire voyage, remaining on board for the round trip—usually three or four months—and receiving in payment an average of a shilling a day. We do not call them “Krumen,” but “Kruboys,” for in Africa they are boys till they die. The Kruboys are the “real thing,” the Africans that you have pictured in your imagination and have read about, and at the sight of them coming off in a fleet of large canoes, accompanied by the whole population, almost stark naked—the majority wearing a bit of calico the size of a pocket-handkerchief—black and savage, and each of them yelling like ten savages, the ladies on board usually hurry down to their cabins and remain for a while in obscurity. Ropes are thrown over to the Kruboys and they climb the side of the ship like monkeys. At closer view they do not appear savage at all. Every face reveals laughing good-nature, and each man looking after his simple necessities in a businesslike way makes himself as comfortable as possible, and yells as loud as possible, while he asks for what he wants and declares to all on board what he is going to do, though he does not seem to expect anybody to listen to him or to pay any attention to him. There is considerable disputation, some quarrelling, and an occasional fight. They have a remarkable way of passing from laughter to quarrel and from fight to song by the easiest sort of transition: passion does not linger.