4 COCOA 



Mersey our steamer is running full-speed ahead past 

 Lisbon, and the sun is hot enough to make us talk 

 about getting out summer clothes. Two days later 

 we sight the peak of Teneriffe in the Canary Islands; 

 now the sun is beginning to stoke up fast and furiously, 

 preparing to do justice to his West African reputation. 

 Eight nights after leaving home in a well-heated ship, 

 where we vainly tried to keep warm in bed by crouching 

 under four blankets and hugging a hot-water bottle, 

 we are lying on our bunks gasping for breath, with the 

 electric fan going, and without so much as a sheet over 

 us. The next morning we get our first view of the 

 African mainland, when Cape Verde looms up on the 

 horizon as a little mound and quickly grows to im- 

 posing height as we draw nearer to it, and see it 

 standing out in contrast with a sea-level shoreline. 

 Henceforth on the voyage we are seldom out of sight 

 of the generally low-lying West African coastland. 



Everyone who is not going to land at Accra begins 

 to bewail the fate of everyone for whom that experience 

 is in store. . . . Under the best of weather conditions 

 rrun the hundred and one stories, grave and gay, 

 of duckings and luggage going to the bottom of the 

 sea the trip in a surf -boat between steamer and beach 

 is a perilous adventure. The men who spin these 

 yarns have all, at some time or other, had to go through 

 the nerve-test as newcomers of listening to similar 

 tales, and they lose no opportunity of paying off that 

 old score. They are used to scoffers among their 

 audience, to a minority on whom they can make no 

 impression, and to a majority who seek chances of 

 taking them on one side to enquire confidentially 

 whether the landing ahead is as fearsome as it is 

 pictured. But it is something of a surprise to them 



