Travels in West Africa

...had never seen before—whom he most likely would never see again—and whom it was of no earthly profit for him to see then. He has settled himself—God only knows where—on his small trading vessels just so that I might have his only cabin. He has fished me out of both the sea and fresh water with boat-hooks; he has continually given me good advice which, if I had only followed it, would have enabled me to keep out of the water and avoid every other sort of trouble. Although he holds the lowest opinion of my intelligence for going to such a place as West Africa for beetles, fish, and religious artifacts fetish: local religious objects or charms believed to have supernatural powers, he has given me the greatest assistance in my work. I pray that you withhold judgment on the value of that work until I lay it before you in about ten volumes or so, mostly written in Latin Kingsley is likely making a self-deprecating joke about the dense, academic nature of scientific reporting.. All that I know to be true regarding the facts of West Africa, I owe to the traders; the errors are my own.

To Dr. Günther of the British Museum, I am deeply grateful for the kindness and interest he has always shown regarding all the specimens of natural history that I have been able to present to him—the majority of which must have had very old stories to tell him. Yet his courtesy and attention gave me the thing a worker in any field wants most—the sense that the work was worth doing—and sent me back to work again with the knowledge that if these things interested a man like him, it was a more than sufficient reason for me to go on collecting them. I am much indebted to Mr. W. H. F. Kirby for his work in classifying my small collection of certain orders of insects, and to Mr. Thomas S. Forshaw for the great help he has provided me in revising my notes.

It is impossible for me to even list my many outstanding debts of gratitude to the West Coast. I am chiefly indebted to Mr. C. G. Hudson, whose kindness and influence enabled me to go up the Ogowé River and to see as much of the French Congo Congo Français: a colonial territory in West-Central Africa, now parts of Gabon and the Republic of the Congo as I have seen; his efforts to take care of me were most effectively supported by Mr. Fildes. The French officials in the "French Congo" never hindered me and always treated me with the greatest kindness. You may say there was no reason why they should not, for there is nothing in this fine colony of France that they need to be ashamed of anyone seeing; but I find it is customary for travelers to say the French officials...