6 I. HOW I CAME TO BE A DOCTOR IN THE FOREST 
atmosphere, are the chief things which make the 
climate of the Ogowe lowlands such a trial for a Euro- 
pean. After a year’s residence fatigue and anaemia 
begin to make themselves disagreeably perceptible. 
At the end of two or three years he becomes incapable 
of real work, and does best to return to Europe for at 
least eight months in order to recruit. 
The mortality among the whites at Libreville, the 
capital of Gaboon, was, in 1903, 14 per cent. 
❖ 
Before the war there lived in the Ogowe lowlands 
about two hundred whites ; planters, timber mer- 
chants, storekeepers, officials, and missionaries. The 
number of the natives is hard to estimate, but, at any 
rate, the country is not thickly inhabited. We have at 
present merely the remains of eight once powerful 
tribes, so terribly has the population been thinned by 
three hundred years of alcohol and the slave trade. Of 
the Orungu tribe, which lived in the Ogowe delta, there 
are scarcely any left ; of the Galoas, who belonged to 
the Lambarene district, there remain still 80,000 at 
most. Into the void thus created there swarmed, from 
inland the cannibal Fans, called by the French Pahouins, 
who have never yet come into contact with civilisation, 
and but for the opportune arrival of the Europeans 
this warrior folk would by this time have eaten up the 
old tribes of the Ogowe lowlands. Lambarene forms 
in the river valley the boundary between the Pahouins 
and the old tribes. 
Gaboon was discovered by the Portuguese at the end 
of the fifteenth century, and by 1521 there was a 
Catholic mission settlement on the coast between the 
