Loango is a “pool harbour,” like the ancient Portus Lemanus (Hythe), a spit of shingle, whose bay, north-east and south-west, forms an inner lagoon, bounded landwards by conspicuous and weather-tarnished red cliffs.  This “lingula” rests upon a base of terra firma whose westernmost projection is Indian Point.  From the latter runs northwards the “infamous” Indian Bar, compared by old sailors with a lengthened Bill of Portland; a reef some three miles long, which the waves assault with prodigious fury; a terror to slavers, especially in our autumn, when the squalls and storms begin.  The light sandy soil of the mainland rests upon compact clay, and malaria rises only where the little drains, which should feed the lagoon, evaporate in swamps.  Here and there are clumps of tall cocoas, a capot, pullom or wild cotton-tree, and a neat village upon prairie land, where stone is rare as on the Pampas.  Southwards the dry tract falls into low and wooded ground.

The natural basin, entered by the north-east, is upwards of a mile in length, and the narrow, ever-shifting mouth is garnished with rocks, the sea breaking right across.  Gunboats have floated over during the rains, but at dead low water in the dry season we would not risk the gig.  Guided by a hut upon the beach fronting French Factory and under lee of the breakers off Indian Bar, I landed near a tree-motte, in a covelet smoothed by a succession of sandpits.  The land sharks flocked down to drag the boat over the breakwater of shingle.  They appeared small and effeminate after the burly negroes of the Bights, and their black but not comely persons were clad in red and white raiment.  It is a tribe of bumboat men, speaking a few words of English, French, and Portuguese, and dealing in mats and pumpkins, parrots, and poultry, cages, and Fetish dolls called “idols.”

Half a mile of good sandy path led to the English Factory, built upon a hill giving a charming view.  To the south-east, and some three miles inland from the centre of the bay, we were shown “Looboo Wood,” a thick motte conspicuously crowning a ridge, and forming a first-rate landmark.  Its shades once sheltered the nyare, locally called buffalo, the gorilla, and perhaps the more monstrous “impungu” (mpongo).  Eastward of the Factory appears Chomfuku, the village of Jim Potter, with a tree-clad sink, compared by old voyagers with “the large chalkpit on Portsdown Hill,” and still much affected by picnickers.  At Loanghili, or Loanguilli, south of Looboo Wood, and upon the right bank of a streamlet which trickles to the sea, is the cemetery, where the kings are buried in gun-boxes.

The Ma-Loango (for mwani, “lord” of Loango), the great despot who ruled as far as the Congo River, who used to eat in one house, drink in another, and put to death man or beast that saw him feeding, is a thing of the past.  Yet five miles to the eastward (here held to be a day’s march) King Monoyambi governs “big Loango town,” whose modern native name, I was told, is Mangamwar.  He shows his power chiefly by forbidding strangers to enter the interior.