which should feed the lagoon, evaporate in swamps. Here and there
are clumps of tall cocoas, a capot, pullom or wild cotton-tree,
and a neat village upon prairie land, where stone is rare as on
the Pampas. Southwards the dry tract falls into low and wooded
ground.

The natural basin, entered by the north-east, is upwards of a
mile in length, and the narrow, ever-shifting mouth is garnished
with rocks, the sea breaking right across. Gunboats have floated
over during the rains, but at dead low water in the dry season we
would not risk the gig. Guided by a hut upon the beach fronting
French Factory and under lee of the breakers off Indian Bar, I
landed near a tree-motte, in a covelet smoothed by a succession
of sandpits. The land sharks flocked down to drag the boat over
the breakwater of shingle. They appeared small and effeminate
after the burly negroes of the Bights, and their black but not
comely persons were clad in red and white raiment. It is a tribe
of bumboat men, speaking a few words of English, French, and
Portuguese, and dealing in mats and pumpkins, parrots, and
poultry, cages, and Fetish dolls called "idols."

Half a mile of good sandy path led to the English Factory, built
upon a hill giving a charming view. To the south-east, and some
three miles inland from the centre of the bay, we were shown
"Looboo Wood," a thick motte conspicuously crowning a ridge, and
forming a first-rate landmark. Its shades once sheltered the
nyare, locally called buffalo, the gorilla, and perhaps the more
monstrous "impungu" (mpongo). Eastward of the Factory appears
Chomfuku, the village of Jim Potter, with a tree-clad sink,
compared by old voyagers with "the large chalkpit on Portsdown