over the side with the idea of dropping it into one of these boats.  But before the chair could be lowered, a rival boat would shove the first one away, and with a third boat would be fighting for its place.  Meanwhile, high above the angry sea, the chair and its cargo of black women would be twirling like a weathercock and banging against the ship’s side.  The mammies were too terrified to scream, but the ship’s officers yelled and swore, the boat’s crews shrieked, and the black babies howled.  Each baby was strapped between the shoulders of the mother.  A mammy-chair is like one of those two-seated swings in which people sit facing one another.  If to the shoulders of each person in the swing was tied a baby, it is obvious that should the swing bump into anything, the baby would get the worst of it.  That is what happened in the mammy-chair.  Every time the chair spun around, the head of a baby would come “crack!” against the ship’s side.  So the babies howled, and no one of the ship’s passengers, crowded six deep along the rail, blamed them.  The skull of the Ethiopian may be hard, but it is most unfair to be swathed like a mummy so that you can neither kick nor strike back, and then have your head battered against a five-thousand-ton ship.

How the boys who paddled the shore boats live long enough to learn how to handle them is a great puzzle.  We were told that the method was to take out one green boy with a crew of eleven experts.  But how did the original eleven become experts?  At Accra, where the waves are very high and rough, are the best boat boys on the coast.  We watched the Custom House boat fight her way across the two miles of surf to the shore.  The fight lasted two hours.  It was as thrilling as watching a man cross Niagara Falls on a tight-rope.  The greater part of the two hours the boat stood straight in the air, as though it meant to shake the crew into the sea, and the rest of the time it ran between walls of water ten feet high and was entirely lost to sight.  Two things about the paddling on the West Coast make it peculiar; the boys sit, not on the thwarts, but on the gunwales, as a woman rides a side-saddle, and in many parts of the coast the boys use paddles shaped like a fork or a trident.  One asks how, sitting as they do, they are able to brace themselves, and how with their forked paddles they obtained sufficient resistance.  A coaster’s explanation of the split paddle was that the boys did not want any more resistance than they could prevent.

 [Illustration:  The Kroo Boys Sit, Not On the Thwarts, but On the
 Gunwales, as a Woman Rides a Side Saddle.]

There is no more royal manner of progress than when one of these boats lifts you over the waves, with the boys chanting some wild chorus, with their bare bodies glistening, their teeth and eyes shining, the splendid muscles straining, and the dripping paddles flashing like twelve mirrors.

Some of the chiefs have canoes of as much as sixty men-power, and when these men sing, and their bodies and voices are in unison, a war canoe seems the only means of locomotion, and a sixty-horse-power racing car becomes a vehicle suited only to the newly rich.