These English And German Lines, Having Come To A Friendly
Understanding Regarding Freights, Work The Bights Of Benin, Biafra,
And
Panavia, without any rivals, save now and again the vessels
chartered by the African Association to bring out a big
Cargo, and
the four sailing vessels belonging to the Association which give an
eighteenth-century look to the Rivers, and have great adventures on
the bars of Opobo and Bonny. {455} The Bristol ships on the Half
Jack Coast are not rivals, but a sort of floating factories,
shipping their stuff home and getting it out by the regular lines of
steamers. The English and German liners therefore carry the bulk of
the trade from the whole Coast. Their services are complicated and
frequent, but perfectly simple when you have grasped the fact that
the English lines may be divided into two sub-divisions - Liverpool
boats and Hamburg boats, either of which are liable when occasion
demands to call at Havre. The Liverpool line is the mail line to
the more important ports, the Hamburg line being almost entirely
composed of cargo vessels calling at the smaller ports as well as
the larger.
There is another classification that must be grasped. The English
boats being divided into, firstly, a line having its terminus at
Sierra Leone and calling at the Isles do Los; secondly, a line
having its terminus at Akassa; thirdly, a line having its terminus
at Old Calabar; fourthly, a line having its terminus at San Paul de
Loanda, and in addition, a direct line from Antwerp to the Congo,
chartered by the Congo Free State Government. Division 4, the
South-westers, are the quickest vessels as far as Lagos, for they
only call at the Canaries, Sierra Leone, off the Kru Coast, at
Accra, and off Lagos; then they run straight from Lagos into
Cameroons, without touching the Rivers, reaching Cameroons in
twenty-seven days from Liverpool. After Cameroons they cross to
Fernando Po and run into Victoria, and then work their way steadily
down coast to their destination. Thence up again, doing all they
know to extract cargo, but never succeeding as they would wish, and
so being hungry in the hold when they get back to the Bight of
Benin, they are liable to smell cargo and go in after it, and
therefore are not necessarily the quickest boats home.
Two French companies run to the French possessions, subsidised by
their Government (as the German line is, and as our lines are not) -
the Chargeurs Reunis and the Fraissinet. The South-west Coast
liners of these companies run to Gaboon and then to Koutonu, up near
Lagos, then back to Gaboon, and down as far as Loango, calling on
their way home at the other ports in Congo Francais. They are
mainly carriers of import goods, because they run to time, and on
the South-west Coast unless Time has an ameliorating touch of
Eternity in it you cannot get export goods off.
Below the Congo the rivals of the English and German lines are the
vessels of the Portuguese line, Empreza Nacional.
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