282	JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS
he even found us enough room to set up chairs and
sit down, though we couldn't, once settled there, stir
a foot.
The launch, the owner told me, had been bought
second-hand for £18 and repaired for £25. It hadn't
even got marine engines. He had installed two
second-hand automobile engines, a Dodge and a
Studebaker, and except for the rock off Sinoe, it had
done well. We slid farther away from the yellow
sandy strip of Africa, from the fringe of dark green
forest behind the tin shacks of Grand Bassa. The
captain, a great fat Km man in a wide-brimmed hat
and a singlet, stood in a little glass shelter and
shouted orders down a telephone to the engine-room
just beneath his feet, the sun came blindingly up over
the thin Japanese cotton awning, a black Methodist
minister went to sleep on my shoulder, and the poli-
ticians temporarily ceased arguing about the election
and began to argue with the captain.
"Say, captain," they protested in their formless
nasal American negro voices, "you don't wanta use
both engines yet. You gotta put out farther before
you use both engines," and the captain argued with
them and presently gave way. He couldn't issue any
order without setting the passengers arguing with
him.
It was sixty miles to Monrovia and the launch took
seven and a half hours, lurching with incredible slow-
ness across the flat scorching African sea with the
rocking motion of the hundred and fifty politicians.
It was an Opposition boat and the presence of a white
man on board seemed to the politicians to have deep
significance. Before we reached Monrovia everv