UGANDA JOURNAL.


 "The Commissioner whose work lay for the main part in wandering through
 a malarial country in some discomfort and danger, spent his holiday in
 travelling through another malarial country, in as great discomfort and at
 no less risk-He went by way of St. Paul de Loanda overland to the Congo,
 shot an elephant or two in the French Congo, went by mission steamer to
 the Sangar river and made his way back to Stanley Pool.
 "At Matadi he found letters from his relief, a mild and enthusiastic young
 man, with a very pink face and gold-mounted spectacles, who had been
 sent up from headquarters (probably out of the Secretariat) to take his
 place as a temporary measure and was quite satisfied in his own mind that
 he was eminently qualified to occupy the seat of the Commissioner".
 Having read the letter, Sanders only comment was, "I think I will go home",
and home he went as quickly as possible to his River, to the great annoyance
of the Acting Commissioner.
 Among the subordinates of his early years there were several of the type of
this young man, who for various reasons had to be got rid of, and this may have
accounted for Sanders' ingrained distrust of assistants and deputies. It is true
that he was not sparing of praise for good work done by Hamilton and Bones,
and also by another promising young man called Carter, who was before their
time and was unfortunately chopped by the tribesmen; and he sent all of these
off at times on independent and responsible missions, and had full confidence
in them, a confidence that increased with the years. But all the time I think there
was at the back of his mind the unspoken feeling, that, without himself in
constant action, or in the background behind his subordinates, the condition of
the River Territories would not be all that could be desired.
 On the other hand he had the superlative merit of accepting full responsibility
for all that was done, either with or without his orders. He never tried to shift
the blame on to the shoulders of his subordinates. Passing the baby was not one
of his official habits.
 IV. The Setting.
 I have already explained that though the scene of the Sanders Saga is laid on
the West Coast, the locality and tribes described are those of the Congo. Wallace,
though purposely vague about geography, did attempt to give some verisimilitude
to the West Coast idea by not infrequent references to towns such as Sierra
Leone, Lagos, Cape Coast Castle, Grand Bassam, Dacca, etc. He implies that
Togoland was on the border of Sanders' Territory, and occasionally gives an
approximate Longitude and Latitude. One of these map references proves on
investigation to be in Togoland, but another is in the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere
off the coast of Brazil! There are also sundry allusions to neighboring Territ-
ories under the rule of the French, Germans, Belgians, Portuguese and even
Spanish.
 All this is immaterial. What is more important is that Sanders' Territory
had a definite geography of its own. He himself lived in a building styled "The
Residency", situate on the coast, at the river mouth. The Elder Dempster steamer