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.
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