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Oil Rivers card from Roger Casement in the Congo

Jeremy Burford

This article first appeared in the Overprinter (the Journal of the GB Overprints Society) in January 2011 and
is reproduced here with permission of the editor and the author

I show here an interesting item of commercially used postal stationery. It is addressed to J Lawson Forfeitt
Esq., FRGS, Underhill Station, Baptist Missionary Society, Matadi, River Congo, and postmarked Old
Calabar River, NO 3 92. Matadi is now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, being one of the few towns
near the coast where the River Congo enters the Gulf of Guinea. The Rev J Lawson Forfeitt, Fellow of the
Royal Geographical Society, was also the co-author of a treatise entitled "George Grenfell and the Congo. A
history and description of the Congo independent state and adjoining districts of Congoland together with
some account of the native peoples and their languages, the fauna and flora; and similar notes on the
Cameroon and the island of Fernando Po. The whole founded on the diaries and researches of the late Rev.