At Boma, the capital of the Congo Free State, sixty miles from the mouth of the river, we lay in against the bank and moored the ship to the shore. Close beside us was a sight upon which I gazed with gruesome interest, the wreck of the steamship _Matadi_. My first voyage to Africa was on the _Matadi_. I think it was on her next voyage that she was wrecked. Like all the ships of her class she was called a palm-oil tub. The steamers of the present service are incomparably better. The _Matadi_ was blown up by a fearful explosion of gunpowder that had been carelessly stored. All the crew except one were drowned. There were also on board two American missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey, who went down with the ship. They were in their cabin when the explosion occurred. The door jammed and could never afterwards be opened, so that the bodies remain there to this day. A smoke-stack protruding out of the water, a part of a poop-deck, overgrown with grass, and an enormous side-piece flung upon the shore—such were the innuendo of the scene. Boma is built on the side of a long, sloping hill. Its buildings, many of them made of sheets of corrugated iron, are scattered in disorder. Behind them on higher ground is the attractive, pale-coloured residence of the governor. There is a good road and several avenues of palms and a number of flower-gardens surrounding the residences. A well-ordered hospital, a state school, a palace of justice, a prison for white men, a fort and barracks are the more conspicuous buildings. Three street-lamps and a native band that plays twice a week, probably by ear, make life delightful and bring the city up to date. Boma looks well from the river—as looks go in Africa. But when one remembers that for more than twenty years it has been the capital of the Congo Free State, a territory four times the size of Germany, from which also vast wealth has been drawn and that Belgium’s civilizing agencies have been concentrated here, one is not greatly impressed. At least it does not compare with the other capitals of West Africa, the French Libreville, the German Dualla or the English Calabar. In the hospital at Boma one may see cases of the strange “sleeping sickness,” that awful scourge that has in late years passed across Africa from the east to the west decimating the population and often in the farther east destroying entire towns. Until very recently there has been no recovery. The patient sleeps without waking, except for food—sleeps and wastes away for eight or ten months until he dies. The germ is now supposed to be carried by the tsetse fly.