It was within an hour of sunset when Purchase, who had been standing up in the stern-sheets of the boat, intently studying the shore of the right bank of the river for some ten minutes, gave the order to douse the canvas and stand by to ship the oars; and as he did so he waved his hand to the coxswain, who put down his helm and sheered the boat in toward what looked like an unbroken belt of mangroves stretching for miles along the bank.  But as the launch, with plenty of way on her, surged forward, an opening gradually revealed itself; and presently we slid into a creek, or channel, some two hundred feet wide, the margins of which were heavily fringed with mangroves, and at once found ourselves winding along this narrow passage of oil-smooth, turbid water, in a stagnant atmosphere of roasting heat that was redolent of all the odours of foetid mud and decaying vegetation.  This channel proved to be about a mile long, and curved round gradually from a north-easterly to a south-easterly direction, ending in a fine spacious lagoon about eight miles long by from three to four miles wide at its widest point, arrived in which we once more felt the breeze and the sails were again set, the boat heading about south-east, close-hauled on the port tack, toward what eventually proved to be an island of very fair size, fringed with the inevitable mangroves, but heavily timbered, as to its interior, with magnificent trees of several descriptions, among which I distinguished several very fine specimens of the _bombax_.  Handsomely weathering this island, with a few fathoms to spare, and standing on until we could weather a small, low-lying island to windward of us on the next tack, we then hove about and stood for the northern shore of the lagoon, by that time some five miles distant, finally shooting in between the mainland and an island nearly two miles long, upon which stood the slave factory that our lads had captured earlier in the day.  The whole surface of this island, except a narrow belt along its southern shore, had been completely cleared of vegetation; and upon the cleared space had been erected two enormous barracoons and, as Purchase had said, a regular village of well-constructed, stone-built houses raised on massive piers of masonry, and with broad galleries and verandahs all round them, evidently intended for the occupation of the slave-dealers and their dependants.  A fine timber wharf extended along the entire northern side of the island, with massive bollards sunk into the soil at regular intervals for ships to make fast to; half a dozen trunk buoys occupied the middle of the fairway; and the whole settlement was completely screened from prying eyes by the heavy belt of standing timber that had been left undisturbed on the southern shore of the island.  I had thought that the factory on the Camma Lagoon represented the last word in the construction of slave-dealing establishments; but this concern was quite twice as extensive, and more elaborately complete in every respect.