Christmas one gets three to four weeks of continuous summer weather, and it is then that the thermometer record is highest.

The average shade temperature in the rainy season is 82°-86° F.,[2] in the dry season about 77°-82° F., the nights being always nearly as hot as the days. This circumstance, and the excessive moisture of the atmosphere, are the chief things which make the climate of the Ogowe lowlands such a trial for a European. After a year's residence fatigue and anæmia 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.

[2] I.e., 28° to 30° and 25° to 28° C.

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 merchants, 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.

The colonization of Ogowe and its missions.

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 mouths of the Congo and the Ogowe. Cape Lopez is named after one of them, Odoardo Lopez, who came out there in 1578. In the eighteenth century the Jesuits had extensive plantations on the coast, with thousands of slaves, but they were as far from penetrating to the hinterland as were the white traders.

When, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the French and the English combined to fight the slave trade on the west coast, they chose, in 1849, the bay which lies north of that of Cape Lopez for the headquarters of their fleet, establishing there also a settlement to which they could send the rescued slaves: hence the name Libreville. That the narrow channels which empty themselves here and there into Cape Lopez bay belonged to a great river, the whites did not yet know, for the natives inhabiting the coast had withheld the information in order to keep the inland trade in their own hands. It was not till 1862 that Lieut. Serval, while on an excursion to the south-east of Libreville, discovered the Ogowe in the neighbourhood of Lambarene. Then began the exploration, from Cape Lopez, of the lower course of the river, and the chiefs were gradually brought to acknowledge the French protectorate.

When in the eighties the need was felt of finding the most convenient route for trade from the coast up to the navigable parts of the Congo, de Brazza believed that it was to be found in the Ogowe, since this river rises only some 125 miles north-west of Stanley Pool, and is separated from the Alima, a navigable tributary of the Congo, only by a narrow watershed. He even succeeded in getting to the Congo by this route a steamer which could be taken to pieces and transported by land, but the route proved to be impracticable for trade on account of the difficulties caused by the rapids in the upper part of the Ogowe. The construction of the Belgian-Congo railway between Matadi and Brazzaville was finished in 1898, and this put a final end to any idea of making the Ogowe a way to the Congo. To-day the Ogowe is used only by the traffic which goes up to its own still comparatively unexplored hinterland.

The first Protestant missionaries on the Ogowe were Americans, who came there about 1860, but as they could not comply with the requirement of the French Government that they should give their school instruction in French, they resigned their work later on to the Paris Missionary Society.

To-day this society owns four stations: N'Gômô, Lambarene, Samkita, and Talagouga. N'Gômô is about 140 miles from the coast, and the others follow one another in that order at intervals of about 35 miles. Talagouga is situated on a picturesque island just in front of N'Djôle, which is the farthest point to which the river steamer goes.

At each Protestant mission station there are generally one unmarried and two married missionaries, and, as a rule, a woman teacher also, making five or six persons, without reckoning the children.

The Catholic mission has three stations in the same district: one in Lambarene, one in N'Djôle, and one near Samba, on the N'Gounje, the largest tributary of the Ogowe, and on each station there live about ten whites: usually three priests, two lay brothers, and five sisters.

The administrative officials of the district are stationed at Cape Lopez, at Lambarene, at Samba, and at N'Djôle, with about five hundred coloured soldiers distributed over it to act as a police force.

Such was the country, and such the people among whom for four and a half years I worked as the forest doctor. What I experienced during that time and the observations I made previous to the outbreak of the war, I shall now describe with the help of the reports which I wrote every six months in Lambarene and sent as printed letters to my friends and supporters. During the war such correspondence was, of course, impossible, and for that later period and for what is said about the religious and social problems treated of, I rely on memoranda which I made for my own use.

CHAPTER II

THE JOURNEY

LAMBARENE, July, 1913.

From the Vosges to Teneriffe

The church bells in my native Alsatian village of Günsbach, in the Vosges, had just ceased ringing for the afternoon service on Good Friday, 1913, when the train appeared round the corner of the wood, and the journey to Africa began. We waved our farewells from the platform of the last coach, and for the last time saw the flêche on the church tower peeping up among the trees. When should we see them again? When next day Strasbourg Cathedral sank out of sight we seemed to be already in a foreign land.

On Easter Sunday we heard once more the dear old organ of S. Sulpice's Church in Paris and the wonderful playing of our friend Widor. At two o'clock the Bordeaux train glided out of the underground station at the Quai d'Orsay, and we began a delightful journey. Everywhere we saw people in their holiday dress; the sunshine was brilliant, and the warm spring breeze brought out of the distance the sound of the village church bells, which seemed to be greetings to the train that was hurrying past. It was an Easter Day which seemed a glorious dream.

The Congo