As our tender came alongside the _Bruxellesville_ at Southampton, we
saw at the winch Kroo boys of the Ivory Coast; leaning over the rail
the Soeurs Blanches of the Congo, robed, although the cold was
bitter and the decks black with soot-stained snow, all in white;
missionaries with long beards, a bishop in a purple biretta, and
innumerable Belgian officers shivering in their cloaks and wearing
the blue ribbon and silver star that tells of three years of service
along the Equator. This time our fellow passengers are no
pleasure-seekers, no Cook's tourists sailing south to avoid a
rigorous winter. They have squeezed the last minute out of their
leave, and they are going back to the station, to the factory, to
the mission, to the barracks. They call themselves "Coasters," and
they inhabit a world all to themselves. In square miles, it is a
very big world, but it is one of those places civilization has
skipped.
Nearly every one of our passengers from Antwerp or Southampton knows
that if he keeps his contract, and does not die, it will be three
years before he again sees his home. So our departure was not
enlivening, and, in the smoking-room, the exiles prepared us for
lonely ports of call, for sickening heat, for swarming multitudes of
blacks.
In consequence, when we passed Finisterre, Spain, which from New
York seems almost a foreign country, was a near neighbor, a dear
friend. And the Island of Teneriffe was an anticlimax.
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