Fixed Across The Stern Of The Canoe There Was The Usual Staging Made
Of Bamboos, Flush With The Gunwale.
Now this sort of staging is an
exceedingly good idea when it is fully finished.
You can stuff no
end of things under it; and over it there is erected a hood of palm-
thatch, giving a very comfortable cabin five or six feet long and
about three feet high in the centre, and you can curl yourself up in
it and, if you please, have a mat hung across the opening. But we
had not got so far as that yet on our vessel, only just got the
staging fixed in fact; and I assure you a bamboo staging is but a
precarious perch when in this stage of formation. I made myself a
reclining couch on it in the Roman manner with my various
belongings, and was exceeding comfortable until we got nearly out of
the Rembwe into the Gaboon. Then came grand times. Our noble craft
had by this time got a good list on her from our collected cargo -
ill stowed. This made my home, the bamboo staging, about as
reposeful a place as the slope of a writing desk would be if well
polished; and the rough and choppy sea gave our vessel the most
peculiar set of motions imaginable. She rolled, which made it
precarious for things on the bamboo staging, but still a legitimate
motion, natural and foreseeable. In addition to this, she had a
cataclysmic kick in her - that I think the heathenish thing meant to
be a pitch - which no mortal being could foresee or provide against,
and which projected portable property into the waters of the Gaboon
over the stern and on to the conglomerate collection in the bottom
of the canoe itself, making Obanjo repeat, with ferocity and
feeling, words he had heard years ago, when he was boatswain on a
steamboat trading on the Coast.
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