The Dantec now brought us up to the stockade, where we awaited the arrival of the officers of the Protectorate. Then between ourselves and our guide began an animated and certainly very curious colloquy; astonishment on one side, vehement explanations on the other. What changes in the expressions of the faces of those engaged in the conversation! What shouts of laughter! What were they saying? This is what I thought I made out. Seeing our three barges each flying a tricolour flag, and the launch with no colours at all, the English of the Protectorate had thought we had retaliated on the Company by a skilful manœuvre for the bad turn they had done the French the year before. “The Company,” they said, “had intended to confiscate our barges, but they being well manned and well armed, had instead captured the launch and taken her down under the French flag to Wari.”
No, I cannot have understood the conversation, I must have dreamed it all! The English never could have believed us capable of such a thing, and would never have suggested it, even in their own language. And yet—!
Who was it told me that the Protectorate and the Company were enemies at heart, and that the English of Wari are always brooding on the damages paid to the Niger traders on account of a certain attack on the people of Brass from Akassa?
No doubt all these are merely such calumnies as are always circulating.
We shall, all five of us, always remember the welcome we received at Wari from the agents of the Protectorate, and this memory will be the more cherished because a few days after our return to France we heard the terrible news of the death of several of them, who, having gone on a mission to the interior almost unarmed, were massacred by the natives of Benin.
We had the best of receptions at Wari; the officers even gave up their rooms and their very beds to us, knowing how greatly we should appreciate such comforts. We became much attached to our new friends.
At Wari I got rid of all the rest of my stores, which would have been an encumbrance to me on my return journey. There were plenty for the missionaries and for the servants at the Consulate. Suzanne, our bicycle, rejoiced the heart of a Sierra Leonese; the Dantec, with a few bottles of claret, delighted Lieutenant Aron; even the Aube we left as a token of our friendship with the agents at the Consulate. We were generous, no doubt, but unless we had sunk our barges when we got to the sea, what else could we have done with them?
As for the Davoust, it took us two days to empty, dismantle, and take her to pieces, after which she was embarked in sections on board the Axim, a Liverpool steamer, which took her back to Europe.
Sold as old metal, and what she fetched debited to the credit of the budget of our expedition, all that is left of the Davoust is now circulating in fairs or figuring in shop-windows, in the form of light match-boxes and other small articles such as are made of aluminium.
And this was the end of all the three sturdy barks: Davoust, Aube, and Dantec, which for twelve whole months were all the world to us!