Captain Canot by Brantz Mayer

The first expedition upon which Don Pedro Blanco despatched me revealed a new phase of Africa to my astonished eyes. I was sent in a small Portuguese schooner to Liberia for tobacco; and here the trader who had never contemplated the negro on the shores of his parent country except as a slave or a catcher of slaves, first beheld the rudiments of an infant state, which in time may become the wedge of Ethiopian civilization.

The comfortable government house, neat public warerooms, large emigration home, designed for the accommodation of the houseless; clean and spacious streets, with brick stores and dwellings; the twin churches with their bells and comfortable surroundings; the genial welcome from well dressed negroes; the regular wharves and trim craft on the stocks, and last of all, a visit from a colored collector with a _printed_ bill for twelve dollars "anchor dues," all convinced me that there was, in truth, something more in these ebony frames than an article of commerce and labor. I paid the bill eagerly, -- considering that a document _printed in Africa by Negroes_, under North American influence, would be a curiosity among the infidels of Gallinas!