the voyage I give you a sketch of in this book.

Thanks to "the Agent," I have visited places I could never otherwise
have seen; and to the respect and affection in which he is held by
the native, I owe it that I have done so in safety. When I have
arrived off his factory in a steamer or canoe unexpected,
unintroduced, or turned up equally unheralded out of the bush in a
dilapidated state, he has always received me with that gracious
hospitality which must have given him, under Coast conditions, very
real trouble and inconvenience--things he could have so readily
found logical excuses against entailing upon himself for the sake of
an individual whom he had never seen before--whom he most likely
would never see again--and whom it was no earthly profit to him to
see then. He has bestowed himself--Allah only knows where--on his
small trading vessels so that I might have his one cabin. He has
fished me out of sea and fresh water with boat-hooks; he has
continually given me good advice, which if I had only followed would
have enabled me to keep out of water and any other sort of
affliction; and although he holds the meanest opinion of my
intellect for going to such a place as West Africa for beetles,
fishes and fetish, he has given me the greatest assistance in my
work. The value of that work I pray you withhold judgment on, until
I lay it before you in some ten volumes or so mostly in Latin. All
I know that is true regarding West African facts, I owe to the
traders; the errors are my own.

To Dr. Gunther, of the British Museum, I am deeply grateful for the
kindness and interest he has always shown regarding all the
specimens of natural history that I have been able to lay before
him; the majority of which must have had very old tales to tell him.