have produced little good; but the king's fortune, ever faithful to his
glory, has since made it appear, by the miscarriage of the expedition of
Gigeri, that such projects only as were planned by himself were worthy of
his attention.

[Gigeri is about forty leagues from Algiers. Till the year 1664 the
French had a factory there; but then attempting to build a fort on
the sea-coast, to be a check upon the Arabs, they came down from the
mountains, beat the French out of Gigeri, and demolished their fort.
Sir Richard Fanshaw, in a letter to the deputy governor of Tangier,
dated 2nd December, 1664, N.S., says, "We have certain intelligence
that the French have lost Gigheria, with all they had there, and
their fleet come back, with the loss of one considerable ship upon
the rocks near Marseilles."--Fanshaw's Letters, vol. i. p. 347.]

A short time after, the king of England, having resolved also to explore
the African coasts, fitted out a squadron for an expedition to Guinea,
which was to be commanded by Prince Rupert. Those who, from their own
experience, had some knowledge of the country, related strange and
wonderful stories of the dangers attendant upon this expedition that they
would have to fight not only the inhabitants of Guinea, a hellish people,
whose arrows were poisoned, and who never gave their prisoners better
quarter than to devour them, but that they must likewise endure heats
that were insupportable, and rains that were intolerable, every drop of
which was changed into a serpent: that, if they penetrated farther into
the country, they would be assaulted by monsters a thousand times more
hideous and destructive than all the beasts mentioned in the Revelations.

But all these reports were vain and ineffectual: for so far from striking
terror into those who were appointed to go upon this expedition, it