Niger

bore Mungo as its solitary passenger when it sailed
from Portsmouth on the 22nd of May, 1795- Mungo
had letters of introduction to Dr. John Laidley, that
gentlemanly slaver and merchant on the Gambia
banks who had befriended Houghton, a letter of
credit for £200, an umbrella, a pocket sextant, a
thermometer, and a few changes of linen. It would
be interesting to know, behind the polite phrasings
of his chronicle, his opinion on the adequacy of the
£200. Concerning the rest of his equipment, how¬
ever, he had no doubts at all. He was especially
fond of the umbrella.
{ On the 4th of June we saw the mountains over
Mogadore.’ Evidently he saw them rise in poetry
as well as in fact, and stared with a quickening of
blood at that first glimpse of the mysterious con¬
tinent. Then the peaks closed away in the sunhaze
while the Endeavour coasted down the African shore
for another seventeen days. They were days weary¬
ing enough in the smell of the hot seas and creaming
surf and the dim company of Captain Richard
Wyatt, that respectable man. But the cool and
diplomatic Mungo officially records the voyage as a
pleasant one of thirty days. Probably he removed
the beaver tile and sighed with satisfaction, never¬
theless, as one morning they warped their way into
Jillifree, a town on the northern bank of the River
Gambia, and opposite to James’s Island, an early
port of the English.
Wyatt had put into Jillifree to trade ; and here it
was that Mungo first looked upon the negro at home
38