King Mombo

by Paul B. Du Chaillu

When the tide served for our departure the captain gave the order to unfurl the sails and raise the anchor. Our ship then glided out into the bay, passed through the Narrows and breasted the broad Atlantic. When we began to lose sight of land, strange sensations crept over me. Before me was the bright future, the great African forest with its tribes of wild men, strange beasts, birds, and insects. Looming above these was the wonderful unknown, so fascinating to me and to all men, especially to lads. Behind me were those I had left, who were dear to me, and to them I whispered a silent farewell, telling them that I would continue to love them and that I would never forget them. That evening with conflicting emotions, and a sad heart I fell asleep.

The following morning when I came on deck there was no land to be seen. The sea with its apparently boundless horizon surrounded our little ship. Long heaving swells rose one after another, and with great wonder my eyes followed them until they faded away in the distance. It seemed as if some great unseen giant were asleep at the bottom of the sea, and that his breathing caused this up-heaving of the ocean into these long swells.

Gulls were our only companions, and followed our little ship; they seemed to fly without any effort whatever, their spread wings remaining perfectly still for minutes at a time. As I watched them, I said musingly: “Dear harmless gulls, where is your home?” And it seemed to me that they answered: “We have no home; we wander far and wide over the ocean, which gives us our food. We rest on the waves now and then, we care not for wind and storms. We often follow ships,—watching for things thrown overboard. But every year we go to the sea cliffs to lay our eggs, and take care of our young. Then we are a great throng together.”

I thought of the many birds of the sea, and of the giant albatross, closely allied to the gulls—the largest and strongest of all sea-birds, measuring sometimes sixteen and seventeen feet between the tips of their extended wings.

My mind was full of reflections as I was looking at the sea, and I said to myself: “How apparently boundless is this great Atlantic Ocean, and how wonderful! In the far north a gigantic barrier of ice prevents the mariner with his ship from reaching the North Pole.” And I thought of all the heroes who had made the attempt in vain. In the far south a still more forbidding and more extended wall of ice prevents the mariner also from reaching the South Pole. I thought of the white bears, the sea-lions, the walrus. I thought of the Esquimaux, of his dogs, of his kayak or skin canoe, and wondered how men could choose such regions to live in; for life, there, is a battle all the time; dangers meet man on every side. The elements and the country are against him; but in spite of all that, the Esquimaux loves the dreary ice and barren rocks where he was born.

How strange, I thought, that no inhabitant had been found in the southern polar regions, and that no bears had ever been discovered there; and how wonderful it was that at the poles, the sun was in sight for six months, and remained unseen during the six other months of the year, so that a day of light and a day of darkness made one year. When the sun shone at the North Pole, it was dark at the South Pole, and vice versa.

I could not help it, but the view of the great ocean that surrounded us set me continually thinking that day. I wondered at the great depth of the sea, and that the Pacific Ocean was even deeper than the Atlantic—the former in some places having been found to be thirty thousand feet deep, and in a number of places the lead having failed to reach the bottom. The pressure of the water is so great that often the wire holding the lead breaks before reaching such great depths; but if our eyes could pierce through this immense mass of water, we should see that the configuration of land at the bottom of the oceans is very much like that of the earth above the sea. We should behold high mountains, deep ravines, and precipices, and large plains or plateaux, and see that in some places the bottom of the sea is changing constantly, owing to drifting deposits. These have been revealed to us by soundings.

Strange to say, under that great mass of water, as upon the land, sudden volcanic eruptions take place which cause islands to rise high above the sea and to disappear again. Many islands to this day have remained as witnesses of these volcanic eruptions, and become, in the course of ages, covered with forests and other vegetation, and are now inhabited by man.

There is about three times as much sea as there is land; and if it were not for the sea bringing moisture, neither tree, beast, nor man could live on the earth. Though the oceans bear different names, they all communicate with each other.

Then I thought of the rain, and all the rivers pouring their waters into the sea, and I wondered why the sea did not get higher, and, in the course of time, overflow the land. It is because of the evaporation of the water. Do we not see, every morning, the dewdrops glitter in the sun and then disappear? They have evaporated, and gone back to help form the clouds, as well as the sea.