Their Surprise Was, However, Great Indeed, When Instead Of The Proper Person Whom They Expected Would Have Received Them, They

Were welcomed on shore by a man called Ducoo, who represented himself as the agent and confidential friend of the

Prince of Rabba, but their surprise was not a little increased on learning that a party of forty or fifty armed Fellata soldiers were also in the town. Ducoo treated them with the courtly politeness of a Frenchman, and was equally lavish in his compliments and offers of service; he walked with them to the chief of the town, to whom he took the liberty of introducing them, almost before he knew himself who or what they were; went himself and procured excellent lodgings for them, returned and sat down in their company to tell them some droll stories, and impart to them in confidence some very disagreeable news; then hastily arose, went out, and came back again with a sheep and other provisions, which he had obtained by compulsion from the chief, and finally remained with them till long after the moon had risen, when he left them to their repose.

The Landers now began to discover that they had been egregiously imposed upon, for in the first place they found, after all, that Lever did not belong to the king of Wowow, though it stands on his dominions, nor had that monarch a single subject here, or a single canoe, so that they were as far as ever they were from getting one, and with the loss of their horses to boot. They now found to their cost that they had been cajoled and out-manoeuvred by those fellows of Boossa and its adjoining state, whom they falsely conceived to be their dearest and best black friends. They had played with them as if they were great dolls; they had been driven about like shuttlecocks; they had been to them first a gazing stock, and afterwards were their laughing stock, and, perhaps, not unlikely their mockery; they had been their admiration, their buffoons, their wonder and their scorn, a by-word and a jest. Else why this double dealing, this deceit, this chicanery, these hollow professions? "Why," as Richard Lander says, "did they entrap us in this manner? Why have they led us about as though we had been blind, only to place us in the very lap of what they imagine to be danger? For can it be possible that the monarchs of Wowow and Boossa were ignorant of the state of things here, which is in their own immediate neighbourhood, and which have continued the same essentially for these three years? Surely," concludes Lander, "they have knowingly deceived us."

The Landers were now placed in a most unpleasant predicament; they could not possibly obtain a canoe according to the promise of the king of Wowow, and to take those which had been lent them by the chief of Patashie, appeared such a breach of confidence, that they could not prevail upon themselves to commit it, but the necessity of the case pleaded strongly in their favour.

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