About a month after the events related in the last chapter the
bluff-bowed French coasting steamer, Admiral Dupont, dropped anchor
in the shallow roadstead off the steamy harbor of Fort Assini on the
far-famed Ivory Coast. A few days before, the boys had left Sierra
Leone and engaged quarters on the cockroach-infested little craft
for the voyage down the coast. It was blisteringly hot and from off
the shore there was borne on the wind the peculiar smell that every
traveler knows as "African." It is the essence of the dark
continent. Our young voyagers and Ben sniffed at it eagerly.

"Smells like marigolds," said Billy at last--and it did.

But there was soon plenty more to discuss than the strange
appearance of the town, which in reality was little more than a big
village with here and there one, or two houses of some pretension
scattered about. For the rest, it consisted of the wickerwork huts
of the natives. Back of the town were dense forests and beyond
these again a long blue line of hills. An unhealthful looking lagoon
lay between the houses and the mainland, into which the boys had been
told the Bia River, up which they were to begin their voyage to the
interior, emptied.

A broad yellow beach stretched in front of the houses and from this,
as soon as the little steamer dropped anchor, whaleboats and canoes
in great numbers were launched through what looked to be a thunderous
surf. They were navigated by Kroomen--or Krooboys as they are
sometimes called--and who are a superior race to most of the natives
of Africa.