Palm oil is the quintessence of West Africa - it is complex, an acquired taste and reckoned to be rather unhealthy. Small chop is the addition of ingredients that make it palatable for European taste. From the unique perspective of working aboard merchant ships trading to the area, the author provides a viewpoint of the first 25 years of West African independence - it is simultaneously the story of the final years of many of the British Merchant Navy's liner trades where fortunes largely depended upon imperial routes. The author served in ships of three very different shipping companies, two British and one Nigerian, and from this unusual breadth of experience, a fascinating story of ships, their crews, their cargoes and the peoples from Senegal to Angola is told. The last of the famous surf ports, the navigation of the twisting waterways of the Niger Delta and the ascent of the great Congo River are vividly described. A colourful picture is painted of the astonishing variety of cargoes and how ships almost literally felt their way across treacherous mudbanks, picked their way through mangrove-bordered creeks with local pilots boarding from canoes.