Even the
seldom-seen 'Sugarloaf' was fairly outlined against the mild blue vault.
Although the withering hand of summer was on the scene, the old
charnel-house looked lovely; even the low lines of the Bullom shore
borrowed a kind of beauty from the air. The hues were those of Heligoland
set in frames of lapis lazuli above and of sapphire below; golden sand,
green strand of silky Bermuda-grass, and red land showing chiefly in banks
and thready paths. Again we admired the dainty and delicate beauties of
the shore about Pirate Bay and other ill-named sites. Then bidding adieu
to the white man's Red Grave and steering south-west, we gave a wide berth
to the redoubted 'Carpenter,' upon which the waves played; to the shoals
of St. Anne, and to a multitude of others which line the coast as far as
that treacherous False Cape and lumpy Cape Shelling or Shilling, whose
prolongation is the Banana group.
Sherbro, fifty miles distant, was passed at night. Then (sixty miles) came
the Gallinas River, a great centre of export, which has not forgotten
Pedro Blanco. This prince of slavers, whose establishment appears on the
charts of 1836-38, imported no goods; he bought cargoes offered to him and
he paid them by bills on England, drawing, says the Coast scandal, upon
two Quaker brothers at Liverpool.
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