After visiting one of these towns, one cannot help being struck with the difference of manner between Christian and Mohammedan negroes. The latter are courteous and dignified, never try to elbow a white man out of the path, or shove against him, or pick a quarrel; and the salutation, “Dam white nigger,” is replaced by the oriental “Salaam Aleykoum,” “Peace be with you;” while the idleness, improvidence, drunkenness, and ignorance of the former is replaced by industry, frugality, temperance, and a certain amount of learning. Yet not satisfied with looking after the converts they have already gained or striving to obtain others from among the idolatrous pagans, missionaries actually endeavour to reduce Mohammedans to the debased condition of their Christian compatriots: fortunately they do not meet with much success. However moralists may endeavour to explain the cause, the fact remains that Christianity does not produce such good results among negroes as do the tenets of Mohammed. Probably I shall bring down a storm of indignation on my head by saying that I consider the former is not a religion adapted to races barely emerging from barbarism. At all events this is what my experience of South and West Africa tells me.
About an hour’s row up the river from Bathurst is the island of St. James, which was the site of the first British settlement established in the Gambia. This isle, now so silent and deserted, was, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the scene of much bloodshed. During our numerous local wars with the French on this coast it was captured by them, and re-captured by us, no less than three times. On the last occasion a French naval force under the Count de Genes, in 1703, destroyed all the houses and devastated the entire settlement; and it was after this that the building of the town of Bathurst was commenced. Why the new colonists did not re-occupy James Island it is difficult to say, as it is fertile, well wooded, and fairly healthy, while St. Mary’s is barren, treeless, and pestilential. The ruins of the old fort, built in 1669, can still be distinguished from the river, covered with brushwood and shrouded in trees. The island is now entirely uninhabited, and its silence is never disturbed except by the advent of an occasional fisherman from the neighbouring Mandingo town of Sikka.