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March 2 -

Yesterday we passed about a hundred miles north of the Cape Verde Islands, and are now only 36 hours from the African coast, but although the sun is hot the breeze is still cool, and a sweater or coat still feel comfortable on deck. This is the calmest day we have had, for although there have been no more real storms there has been a steady roll, with a good deal of pitching and tossing thrown in. The Chief Engineer said the other night that he never remembered a voyage where it had been so "consistently choppy." (Understatement.)

The time has passed quickly and happily. The missionaries are packing today, for they expect to leave us at Dakar the day after tomorrow. We shall miss them, for they are the most interesting to listen to, with their casual tales of river steamers, marauding elephants, leopards that come into the mission at night, hunts in the Ubangi country, and stories of the Bantu negroes among whom they work. They are taking with them supplies for a couple of years, including everything from hymn books to carrot seeds. In the evenings when we sit around the radio in the dining room we play simple games, the most popular at the moment being "Pick up sticks", a sort of jackstraws. To watch Bernice with her small steady hands manipulating one of the sticks with as much intentness as though her life depended on it, or to watch the Chief Engineer, who is the biggest man I've ever seen, with enormous hands, working out the stress and strain of the slender pieces of wood, is good evening's entertainment.

The radio brings us a great deal of both British and German propaganda. Short-wave from the States is directed to South America and is mostly in Spanish or Portuguese. Lowell Thomas' hour came in clearly for about a week; he gave us news of the burning of the Cole Circus in winter quarters and the death of Gumdrop, the pigmy hippo born in the zoo and later traded to the Circus. Norris had taken care of the animal when it was a baby, and he felt expecially sad at learning that it had been, in Lowell's words, "boiled alive in its tank".

Ocean life has become visible once more after a long stretch of apparently uninhabited water. Flying fish made their first appearance yesterday; today we have seen a shark, a school of porpoises, lots of Portuguese men-of-war, and one tern swooping over the water like a swallow over fields at home.

March 4 -

We sighted the lighthouse at Dakar at 7.54 last night - noting the exact time because we had a sweep on it, which the captain won. We stopped for the night, and rocked and drifted until morning. A small destroyer came out at about eight o'clock to lead us into the harbor, and we watched with considerable awe the number of guns on the low hills that enclose the harbor. A torpedo and submarine net of heavy wire cable stretches on for about a mile, from the mainland to Goree Island, just across the harbor, and on to the mainland again. It is marked with floating barrels, and ships coming into Dakar are piloted through a narrow gate which is opened and closed again.