"To begin with, I learned much about rivers. In England a river is something easily comprehended. You can see along it, and across it, and it is locked, bolted and barred with towns and bridges and weirs and tow-paths. It is no more like an African river than a tame cat is like a leopard. Yet on the map the only difference is that perhaps the large river will have two mouths, and several tributaries running into it, exactly like a branch running into a tree. It wasn't like that at all. I had an atlas with me and when we reached the mouths of the great river I tried to find out where we were on the map. But it was hopeless. Where the map showed one channel there were hundreds on the chart. And the chart was out-of-date. It seemed a dream to me. I was under the impression that navigation nowadays was a humdrum affair of making points, steering on a ruled pencil line on the chart, so much for currents, so much for tides and so on. So it is, no doubt, in a great measure; but we can hardly realize how much of it is sheer skill and gallant daring. Even the men who do it don't realize it because they are always doing it. That first voyage to Port Duluth was a revelation to me in several ways. I had my own private troubles you may be sure. I was as green as grass. My hands blistered and my heart sickened many a time. But I am glad to think I could see other things as well. To me it was thrilling to look out across the oily blue glitter and see a hazy line which was the Ivory Coast. There was the Slave Coast and the Gold Coast--the words had a new significance now! And when I came up out of that awful engine-room and saw the land close in, the eternal grey-green line of mangrove swamp holding up the blazing vault of the sky, I forgot my troubles. I said to myself in a whisper, 'This is what I came for. This is the world!'
"I asked where we had anchored, seeing no sign of life ashore, and they told me it was the Bar. We must wait for high water. Away ahead was the bar buoy, a white blob on the water. I stood leaning against a stanchion trying to sense the atmosphere of the place until the Second called me, for there was something to do. There was always something to do in that terrible old ship. I went down, and together we wrestled with the dynamo-engine, a cheap contraption with a closed crank chamber full of muddy oil which was supposed to splash into all the bearings, and didn't. We needed a washer, a special sort of thing. The old one was worn out. We needed screws, too, to fasten it with, small brass screws with flat heads that sank in out of sight. When I asked where these were coming from if we hadn't got them on the ship, the Second said with some asperity, that it would be my job to make them on my anchor watch that night. I was surprised at this and made some remark about getting them from ashore, and it so tickled the poor over-worked Second that he stood up suddenly, spun round towards the reversing engine and broke into peals of hysterical laughter. I shall never forget the sight of him as he stood there in his sodden, filthy singlet and dungarees, his arms knotted and burned and bruised, his common little face twisted into an expression of super-human scorn. For a single moment he was sublime, lifted out of himself, with the mere effort of pouring contempt upon my ignorance. He tried to put it into words, and sputtered. He looked as though in a trance and some stormy spirit was struggling within him. The sweat ran off us in streams as we stood there in the light of a couple of slush-lamps flaring in the draught from the stokehold door. Then he abruptly abandoned his search for vitriolic language and rushed into the store for a piece of brass rod. It was a curious performance. I was impressed. I realized in a dim way that there was no longer a hardware shop round the corner. The making of those screws was nothing in itself, but it was the principle behind it, the principle of never being stumped. And these rough, uncultured, north-countrymen were my teachers. The Chief fixed me with his one good eye at lunch. 'We don't get things from ashore in this employ,' he observed, and left me to soak it in.