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RUSSIA AS IT IS.

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CONTENTS.—Preface.—Introduction.—Czarism: its historical origin.—The Czar Nicholas.—The Organization of the Government.—The Army and Navy.—The Nobility.—The Clergy.—The Bourgeoisie.—The Cossacks.—The Real People, the Peasantry.—The Rights of Aliens and Strangers.—The Commoner.—Emancipation.—Manifest Destiny.—Appendix.—The Amazons.—The Fourteen Classes of the Russian Public Service; or, the Tschins.—The Political Testament of Peter the Great.—Extract from an Old Chronicle.

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AFRICA
AND
THE AMERICAN FLAG.

BY

COMMANDER ANDREW H. FOOTE,

U. S. NAVY,

LIEUT. COMMANDING U. S. BRIG PERRY ON THE COAST OF AFRICA,

A. D. 1850-1851.

NEW YORK:
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M DCCC LIV.

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By D. APPLETON & COMPANY,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

TO

COMMODORE JOSEPH SMITH, U. S. N.,

CHIEF OF THE NAVAL BUREAU OF YARDS AND DOCKS,

This Volume is Dedicated,

AS A SLIGHT TRIBUTE

OF RESPECT FOR HIS OFFICIAL CHARACTER,

AND AS AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT

OF HIS UNIFORM ATTACHMENT

AS A FRIEND.

CONTENTS.

PROBABLE CONFIGURATION
of
AFRICA,
as represented by
Contouror Horizontal
Planes.

AFRICA
AND
THE AMERICAN FLAG.

CHAPTER I.

SUBJECT AND ARRANGEMENT—AREA OF CRUISING-GROUND—DISTRIBUTION OF SUBJECTS.

On the 28th of November, 1849, the U. S. brig “Perry” sailed for the west coast of Africa, to join the American squadron there stationed.

A treaty with Great Britain, signed at Washington in the year 1842, stipulates that each nation shall maintain on the coast of Africa, a force of naval vessels “of suitable numbers and description, to carry in all not less than eighty guns, to enforce separately and respectively, the laws, rights, and obligations of each of the two countries, for the suppression of the slave-trade.”

Although this stipulation was limited to the term of five years from the date of the exchange of the ratifications of the treaty, “and afterwards until one or the other party shall signify a wish to terminate it;” the United States have continued to maintain a squadron on that coast for the protection of its commerce, and for the suppression of the slave-trade, so far as it might be carried on in American vessels, or by American citizens.

To illustrate the importance of this squadron, the relations which its operations bear to American interests, and to the rights of the American flag; its effects upon the condition of Africa in checking crime, and preparing the way for the introduction of peace, prosperity, and civilization, is the primary object of this work.

A general view of the continent of Africa, comprising the past and present condition of its inhabitants; slavery in Africa and its foreign slave-trade; the piracies upon the coast before it was guarded and protected by naval squadrons; the geological structure of the country; its natural history, languages, and people; and the progress of colonization by the negro race returning to their own land with the light of religion, of sound policy, and of modern arts, will also be introduced as subjects appropriate to the general design.

If a chart of the Atlantic is spread out, and a line drawn from the Cape Verde Islands towards the southeastern coast of Brazil; if we then pass to the Cape of Good Hope and draw another from that point by the island of St. Helena, crossing the former north of the equator, the great tracks of commerce will be traced. Vessels outward bound follow the track towards the South American shore, and the homeward bound are found on the other. Thus vessels often meet in the centre of the Atlantic; and the crossing of these lines off the projecting shores of central Africa renders the coasts of that region of great naval importance.

The wide triangular space of sea between the homeward bound line and the retiring African seaboard around the Gulf of Guinea, constituted the area on which the vigilance of the squadron was to be exercised. Here is the region of crime, suffering, cruelty and death, from the slave-trade; and here has been at different ages, when the police of the sea happened to be little cared for, the scene of the worst piracies which have ever disgraced human nature.

Vessels running out from the African coast fall here and there into these lines traced on the chart, or sometimes cross them. No one can tell what they contain from the graceful hull, well-proportioned masts, neatly trimmed yards, and gallant bearing of the vessel. This deceitful beauty may conceal wrong, violence, and crime—the theft of living men, the foulness and corruption of the steaming slave-deck, and the charnel-house of wretchedness and despair.

It is difficult in looking over the ship’s side to conceive the transparency of the sea. The reflection of the blue sky in these tropic regions colors it like an opaque sapphire, till some fish startles one by suddenly appearing far beneath, seeming to carry daylight down with him into the depths below. One is then reminded that the vessel is suspended over a transparent abyss. There for ages has sunk the dark-skinned sufferer from “the horrors of the middle passage,” carrying that ghastly daylight down with him, to rest until “the sea shall give up its dead,” and the slaver and his merchant come from their places to be confronted with their victim.

The relation of the western nations to these shores present themselves under three phases, which claim more or less attention in order to a full understanding of the subject. These are,

I. Period of Discovery, Piracy and Slaving.

II. Period of Colonizing.

III. Period of Naval Cruising.

CHAPTER II.

DISCOVERIES BY FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE ALONG THE COAST—CAPE OF GOOD HOPE—RESULTS.

The French of Normandy contested with the Portuguese the honor of first venturing into the Gulf of Guinea. It was, however, nearly a hundred years from the time when the latter first embarked in these discoveries, until, in 1487, they reached the Cape of Good Hope. For about eight centuries the Mohammedan in the interior had been shaping out an influence for himself by proselyting and commerce. The Portuguese discoverer met this influence on the African shores. The Venetians held a sort of partnership with the Mohammedans in the trade of the East: Portugal had then taken scarcely any share in the brilliant and exciting politics of the Levant; her vocation was to the seas of the West, but in that direction she was advancing to an overwhelming triumph over her Eastern competitor.

On the 3d of May, 1487, a boat left one of two small high-sterned vessels, of less tonnage than an ordinary river sloop of the present day, and landed a few weather-beaten men on a low island of rocks, on which they proceeded to erect a cross. The sand which rustled across their footsteps, the sigh of the west wind among the waxberry bushes, and the croakings of the penguins as they waddled off,—these were the voices which hailed the opening of a new era for the world; for Bartholomew Diaz had then passed the southern point of Africa, and was listening to the surf of the Antarctic Sea.

This enterprising navigator had sailed from Lisbon in August, 1486, and seems to have reached Sierra Parda, north of the Orange River, in time to catch the last of the strong southeasterly winds, prevailing during the summer months on the southern coast of Africa, in the region of the Cape. He stood to the southwest, in vessels little calculated for holding a wind, and at length reached the region of the prevailing southwest winds. Then standing to the eastward he passed the Cape of Good Hope, of which he was in search, and bearing away to the northward, after running a distance of four hundred miles, brought up at the island of St. Croix above referred to. Coasting along on his return, the Cape was doubled, and named Cabo Tormentoso, or the Cape of Storms. The King of Portugal, on the discoverer’s return, gave it the more promising name of Cabo de buen Speranza, or Cape of Good Hope.

Africa thus fell into the grasp of Europe. Trade flowed with a full stream into this new channel. Portugal conquered and settled its shores. Missionaries accompanied the Portuguese discoverers and conquerors to various parts of Africa, where the Portuguese dominion had been established, and for long periods influenced the condition of the country.

CHAPTER III.

PIRATES—DAVIS, ROBERTS, AND OTHERS—BRITISH CRUISERS—SLAVE-TRADE SYSTEMATIZED—GUINEAMEN—“HORRORS OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE.”

The second period is that of villany. More Africans seem to have been bought and sold, at all times of the world’s history, than of any other race of mankind. The early navigators were offered slaves as merchandise. It is not easy to conceive that the few which they then carried away, could serve any other purpose than to gratify curiosity, or add to the ostentatious greatness of kings and noblemen. It was the demands of the west which rendered this iniquity a trade. Every thing which could debase a man was thrust upon Africa from every shore. The old military skill of Europe raised on almost every accessible point embattled fortresses, which now picturesquely line the Gulf of Guinea. In the space between Cape Palmas and the Calabar River, there are to be counted, in the old charts, forts and factories by hundreds.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were especially the era of woe to the African people. Crime against them on the part of European nations, had become gross in cruelty and universal in extent. From the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean, in respect to their lands or their persons, the European was seizing, slaying and enslaving. The mischief perpetrated by the white man, was the source of mischief to its author. The west coast became the haunt and nursery of pirates. In fact, the same class of men were the navigators of the pirate and the slaver; and sailors had little hesitation in betraying their own vessels occasionally into the hands of the buccaneer. Slave-trading afforded a pretext which covered all the preparations for robbery. The whole civilized world had begun to share in this guilt and in this retribution.

In 1692, a solitary Scotchman was found at Cape Mesurado, living among the negroes. He had reached the coast in a vessel, of which a man named Herbert had gotten possession in one of the American colonies, and had run off with on a buccaneering cruise; a mutiny and fight resulted in the death of most of the officers and crew. The vessel drifted on shore, and bilged in the heavy surf at Cape Mesurado.

The higher ranks of society in Christendom were then most grossly corrupt, and had a leading share in these crimes. There arrived at Barbadoes in 1694, a vessel from New England, which might then have been called a clipper, mounting twenty small guns. A company of merchants of the island bought her, and fitted her out ostensibly as a slaver, bound to the island of Madagascar; but in reality for the purpose of pirating on the India merchantmen trading to the Red Sea. They induced Russell, the governor of the island, to join them in the adventure, and to give the ship an official character, so far as he was authorized to do so by his colonial commission.

A “sea solicitor” of this order, named Conklyn, arrived in 1719 at Sierra Leone in a state of great destitution, bringing with him twenty-five of the greatest villains that could be culled from the crews of two or three piratical vessels on the coast. A mutiny had taken place in one of these, on account of the chief’s assuming something of the character and habits of a gentleman, and Conklyn, after a severe contention, had left with his desperate associates. Had he remained, he might have become chief in command, as a second mutiny broke out soon after his departure, in which the chief was overpowered, placed on board one of the prize vessels, and never heard of afterwards. The pirates under a new commander followed Conklyn to Sierra Leone. They found there this worthy gentleman, rich, and in command of a fine ship with eighty men.

Davis, the notorious pirate, soon joined him with a well-armed ship manned with one hundred and fifty men. Here was collected as fruitful a nest of villany as the world ever saw. They plundered and captured whatever came in their course. These vessels, with other pirates, soon destroyed more than one hundred trading vessels on the African coast. England entered into a kind of compromise, previously to sending a squadron against them, by offering pardon to all who should present themselves to the governor of any of her colonies before the first of July, 1719. This was equivalent to offering themselves to serve in the war which had commenced against Spain, or exchanging one kind of brigandage for another, by privateering against the Spanish commerce. But from the accounts of their prisoners very few of them could read, and thus the proclamation was almost a dead letter.

In 1720, Roberts, a hero of the same class, anchored in Sierra Leone, and sent a message to Plunket, the commander of the English fort, with a request for some gold dust and ammunition. The commander of the fort replied that he had no gold dust for them, but that he would serve them with a good allowance of shot if they ventured within the range of his guns; whereupon Roberts opened his fire upon the fort. Plunket soon expended all his ammunition, and abandoned his position. Being made prisoner he was taken before Roberts: the pirate assailed the poor commander with the most outrageous execrations for his audacity in resisting him. To his astonishment Plunket retorted upon him with oaths and execrations yet more tremendous. This was quite to the taste of the scoundrels around them, who, with shouts of laughter, told their captain that he was only second best at that business, and Plunket, in consideration of his victory, was allowed to escape with life.

In 1721, England dispatched two men-of-war to the Gulf of Guinea for the purpose of exterminating the pirates who had there reached a formidable degree of power, and sometimes, as in the instance noted above, assailed the establishments on shore. They found that Roberts was in command of a squadron of three vessels, with about four hundred men under his command, and had been particularly active and successful in outrage. After cruising about the northern coast, and learning that Roberts had plundered many vessels, and that sailors were flocking to him from all quarters, they found him on the evening of the third of February, anchored with his three vessels in the bay north of Cape Lopez.

When entering the bay, light enough remained to let them see that they had caught the miscreants in their lair. Closing in with the land the cruisers quietly ran in and anchored close aboard the outer vessel belonging to the pirates. Having ascertained the character of the visitors, the pirate slipped his cables, and proceeded to make sail, but was boarded and secured just as the rapid blackness of a tropical night buried every thing in obscurity. Every sound was watched during the darkness of the night, with scarcely the hope that the other two pirates would not take advantage of it to make their escape; but the short gray dawn showed them still at their anchors. The cruisers getting under way and closing in with the pirates produced no movement on their part, and some scheme of cunning or desperate resistance was prepared for. They had in fact made a draft from one vessel to man the other fully for defence. Into this vessel the smaller of the cruisers, the Swallow, threw her broadside, which was feebly returned. A grape-shot in the head had killed Roberts. This and the slaughter of the cruiser’s fire prepared the way for the boarders, without much further resistance, to take possession of the pirate. The third vessel was easily captured.

The cruisers suffered no loss in the fight, but had been fatally reduced by sickness. The larger vessel, the Weymouth, which left England with a crew of two hundred and forty men, had previously been reduced so greatly as scarcely to be able to weigh her anchors; and, although recruited often from merchant vessels, landed but one hundred and eighty men in England. This rendered the charge of their prisoners somewhat hazardous, and taking them as far as Cape Coast Castle, they there executed such justice as the place could afford, or the demerits of their prey deserved. A great number of them ornamented the shore on gibbets—the well-known signs of civilization in that era—as long as the climate and the vultures would permit them to hang.

Consequent on these events such order was established as circumstances would admit, or rather the progress of maritime intercourse and naval power put an end to the system of daring and regulated piracy by which the tropical shores of Africa and the West Indies had been laid waste. This, however, was slight relief for Africa. It was to secure and systematize trade that piracy had been suppressed, and the slave-trade became accordingly cruelly and murderously systematic.

The question what nation should be most enriched by the guilty traffic was a subject of diplomacy. England secured the greater share of the criminality and of the profit, by gaining from her other competitors the right by contract to supply the colonies of Spain with negroes.

Men forget what they ought not to forget; and however startling, disgusting, and oppressive to the mind of man the horrors are which characterized that trade, it is well that since they did exist the memory of them should not perish. It is a fearfully dark chapter in the history of the world, but although terrific it has its value. It is more worthy of being remembered than the historical routine of wars, defeats, or victories; for it is more illustrative of man’s proper history, and of a strange era in that history. The evidence taken by the Committee of the English House of Lords in 1850, has again thrust the subject into daylight.

The slave-trade is now carried on by comparatively small and ill-found vessels, watched by the cruisers incessantly. They are therefore induced, at any risk of loss by death, to crowd and pack their cargoes, so that a successful voyage may compensate for many captures. In olden times, there were vessels fitted expressly for the purpose—large Indiamen or whalers. It has been objected to the employment of squadrons to exterminate that trade, that their interference has increased its enormity. This, however, is doing honor to the old Guineamen, such as they by no means deserve. It is, in fact, an inference in favor of human nature, implying that a man who has impunity and leisure to do evil, cannot, in the nature of things, be so dreadfully heartless in doing it, as those in whose track the avenger follows to seize and punish. The fact, however, does not justify this surmise in favor of impunity and leisure. If ever there was any thing on earth which, for revolting, filthy, heartless atrocity, might make the devil wonder and hell recognize its own likeness, then it was on any one of the decks of an old slaver. The sordid cupidity of the older, as it is meaner, was also more callous than the hurried ruffianism of the present age. In fact, a slaver now has but one deck; in the last century they had two or three. Any one of the decks of the larger vessels was rather worse, if this could be, than the single deck of the brigs and schooners now employed in the trade. Then, the number of decks rendered the suffocating and pestilential hold a scene of unparalleled wretchedness. Here are some instances of this, collected from evidence taken by the British House of Commons in 1792.

James Morley, gunner of the Medway, states: “He has seen them under great difficulty of breathing; the women, particularly, often got upon the beams, where the gratings are often raised with banisters, about four feet above the combings, to give air, but they are generally driven down, because they take the air from the rest. He has known rice held in the mouths of sea-sick slaves until they were almost strangled; he has seen the surgeon’s mate force the panniken between their teeth, and throw the medicine over them, so that not half of it went into their mouths—the poor wretches wallowing in their blood, hardly having life, and this with blows of the cat.”

THE LOWER DECK OF A GUINEA-MAN IN THE LAST CENTURY.

Dr. Thomas Trotter, surgeon of the Brookes, says: “He has seen the slaves drawing their breath with all those laborious and anxious efforts for life which are observed in expiring animals, subjected, by experiment, to foul air, or in the exhausted receiver of an air-pump; has also seen them when the tarpaulins have inadvertently been thrown over the gratings, attempting to heave them up, crying out ‘kickeraboo! kickeraboo!’ i. e., We are dying. On removing the tarpaulin and gratings, they would fly to the hatchways with all the signs of terror and dread of suffocation; many whom he has seen in a dying state, have recovered by being brought on the deck; others, were irrevocably lost by suffocation, having had no previous signs of indisposition.”

In regard to the Garland’s voyage, 1788, the testimony is: “Some of the diseased were obliged to be kept on deck. The slaves, both when ill and well, were frequently forced to eat against their inclination; were whipped with a cat if they refused. The parts on which their shackles are fastened, are often excoriated by the violent exercise they are forced to take, and of this they made many grievous complaints to him. Fell in with the Hero, Wilson, which had lost, he thinks, three hundred and sixty slaves by death; he is certain more than half of her cargo; learnt this from the surgeon; they had died mostly of the smallpox; surgeon also told him, that when removed from one place to another, they left marks of their skin and blood upon the deck, and that it was the most horrid sight he had ever seen.”

The annexed sketch represents the lower deck of a Guineaman, when the trade was under systematic regulations. The slaves were obliged to lie on their backs, and were shackled by their ankles, the left of one being fettered close to the right of the next; so that the whole number in one line formed a single living chain. When one died, the body remained during the night, or during bad weather, secured to the two between whom he was. The height between decks was so little, that a man of ordinary size could hardly sit upright. During good weather, a gang of slaves was taken on the spar-deck, and there remained for a short time. In bad weather, when the hatches were closed, death from suffocation would necessarily occur. It can, therefore, easily be understood, that the athletic strangled the weaker intentionally, in order to procure more space, and that, when striving to get near some aperture affording air to breathe, many would be injured or killed in the struggle.

Such were “the horrors of the middle passage.”

CHAPTER IV.[1]

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY—CLIMATE—GEOLOGY—ZOOLOGY—BOTANY.

Before proceeding to the colonizing era, it will be requisite to present an estimate of the value and importance of the African continent in relation to the rest of the world. This requires some preliminary notice of the physical condition of its territories, and the character and distribution of the tribes possessing them. Africa has not yet yielded to science the results which may be expected from it. Courage and hardihood, rather than knowledge and skill, have, from the circumstances of the case, been the characteristics of its successful explorers. We have, therefore, wonderful incidents and loose descriptions, without the accurate observation and statement of circumstances which can render them useful.

The vast radiator formed by the sun beating vertically on the plains of tropical Africa, heats and expands the air, and thus constitutes a sort of central trough into which gravitation brings compensating currents, by producing a lateral sliding inwards of the great trade-wind streams. Thus, as a general rule, winds which would normally diverge from the shores are drawn in towards them. They have been gathering moisture in their progress, and when pressed upwards, as they expand under the vertical sun, lose their heat in the upper regions, let go their moisture, and spread over the interior terraces and mountains a sheet of heavily depositing cloud. This constitutes the rainy season, which necessarily, from the causes producing it, accompanies the sun in its apparent oscillations across the equator.

The Gulf of Guinea has in its own bosom a system of hurricanes and squalls, of which little is known but their existence and their danger. A description of them, of rather an old date, specifies as a fact that they begin by the appearance of a small mass of clouds in the zenith, which widens and extends till the canopy covers the horizon. Now if this were true of any given spot, it would indicate that the hurricane always began there. The appearance of a patch of cloud in the zenith could be true of only one place out of all those which the hurricane influenced. If it is meant that wherever the phenomenon originated, there a mass of cloud gradually formed in the zenith, this would be a most important particular in regard to the proximate cause of the phenomenon, for it would mark a rapid direction upwards of the atmosphere at that spot as the first observable incident of the series. That the movements produced would subsequently become whirling or circumvolant, is a mechanical necessity. But the force of the movement ought not to be strongest at the place where the mischief had its origin.

The squalls, with high towering clouds, which rise like a wall on the horizon, involve the same principles as to the formation of the vapor, and are easily explicable. They are not necessarily connected with circular hurricanes; but the principles of their formation may modify the intensity of the blasts in a circumvolant tornado. Since in the Gulf of Guinea they come from the eastward, it is to be inferred that they are ripples or undulations in an air current. In regard to all of this, it is necessary to speak doubtfully, for there is a great lack of accurate and detailed observation on these points.

Its position and physical characteristics give to this continent great influence over the rest of the earth. Africa, America, and Australia have nearly similar relations to the great oceans interposed respectively between them. Against the eastern sides of these regions are carried from the ocean those strange, furious whirlings in the shallow film of the earth’s atmosphere, which constitute hurricanes. It is evident that these oceans are mainly the channels in which the surface winds move, which are drawn from colder regions towards the equator. The shores are the banks of these air streams. The return currents above flow over every thing. They are thus prevalent in the interior, so that the climatic conditions there are different from those on the seaboard. These circumstances in the southern extra-tropical regions are accompanied by corresponding differences in the character of the vegetable world.

These winds are sometimes drawn aside across the coast line—constituting the Mediterranean sirocco, and the African harmattan. Vessels far off at sea, sailing to the northward, are covered or stained on the weather side of their rigging (that next to the African coast), with a fine light-yellow powder. A reddish-brown dust sometimes tinges the sails and rigging. An instance of this occurred on board the “Perry” on her outward bound passage, when five hundred miles from the African coast.

The science of Ehrenberg has been searching amid the microscopic organisms contained in these substances, for tokens of their origin. In the red material he finds forms betraying not an African, but an American source, presumed to be in the great plains of the Amazon and Orinoco. This suggests new views of the meteorology of the world; but the theories founded on it, are not clear of mechanical difficulties.

If we stand on almost any shore of the world as it exists at present, and consider the character of the land surface on the one hand, and of the ocean bottom on the other, we shall see that a very great difference in the nature of the beach line would be produced by a depression of the land towards the ocean, or by an elevation of it from the deep. The sea in its action on the bottom fills up hollows and obliterates precipices; but a land surface is worn into ravines and valleys. Hence a depression, so that the waters overflowed the land, would admit them into its recesses, and river courses, and winding gulleys—forming bays, islands, and secure harbors. Whereas elevation would bring up from the bottom its sand-banks and plains, forming an extent of slightly winding and unsheltered shore. The character of a coast will therefore depend very greatly upon its former history, before it became fixed. We have this contrast in the eastern and western sides of the Adriatic, or in the western and eastern sides of the British islands. These circumstances are to some degree controlled by the effects of partial volcanoes, or of powerful winds and currents. But on the whole, it may generally be inferred that a long unbroken shore indicates that the last change on the land level was one of elevation; while a coast penetrated, broken, and defended by islands has received its conformation from being stopped in the process of subsiding.

The coast of Africa has over almost its whole circuit, that unbroken or slightly indented outline which would arise from upheaval. The only conspicuous exception to this, is in the eastern region, neighboring on the Mozambique Channel, where the Portuguese and the Arab possess the advantage, so rare in Africa, of having at their command convenient and sheltered harbors. There are centres of partial volcanic agency in the islands of the Atlantic, north of the equator, and in the distant spots settled by Europeans outside of Madagascar; but this action has not, as in the Mediterranean or Archipelago, modified the character of the continental shore. It is not known that there exists any active volcano on the continent.

Africa, therefore, if it could be seen on a great model of the world, would offer little, comparatively, that was varied in outline or in aspect. There would be great tawny deserts, with scanty specks of dusky green, or threads of sombre verdure tracing out its scant and temporary streams. There would be forests concealing or embracing the mouths of rivers, with brown mountains here and there penetrating through them, but rarely presenting a lofty wall to the sea. Interior plains would show some glittering lakes, begirt by the jungle which they create. But it is a land nearly devoid of winter, either temporary or permanent. Only one or two specks, near the mouth of the Red Sea, and a short beaded line of the chain of Atlas, would throw abroad the silver splendor of perpetual snow. It is the great want of Africa, that so few mountains have on their heads these supplies for summer streams.

The sea-shore is generally low, except as influenced by Atlas, or the Abyssinian ranges, or the mountains of the southern extremity. There is, not uncommonly, a flat swampy plain, bordering on the sea, where the rivers push out their deltas, or form lagoons by their conflict with the fierce surge upon the shore. Generally at varying distances, there occur falls or rapids in the great rivers, showing that they are descending from interior plains of considerable elevation. The central regions seem, in fact, to form two, or perhaps three great elevated plateaux or terraced plains, having waters collected in their depressions, and joined by necks; such as are the prairies of Illinois, between the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, or the llanos of South America between its great rivers. The southern one of these African plains approaches close to the Atlantic near the Orange River. Starting there at the height of three thousand feet, it proceeds round the sources of the river, and spreads centrally along by the lately visited, but long known lakes north of the tropic. The equinoctial portion of it is probably drained by the Zambeze and the Zaire, flowing in opposite directions. It appears to be continuous as a neck westward of Kilmandjaro, the probable source of the Nile; till it spreads out into the vast space extending from Cape Verde to Suez, including in it the Niger and the Nile, the great desert, and the collections of waters forming Lake Tzad, and such others as there may be towards Fitre.

The mountains inclosing these spaces form a nearly continuous wall along the eastern side of Africa. The snows of Atlas form small streams, trickling down north and south; and, in the latter case, struggling almost in vain with the tropical heats, in short courses, towards the Desert of Sahara.

There are found separate groups of mountains, forming for the continent a broken margin on the west. There may also be an important one situated centrally between Lake Tzad and the Congo; but there appears no probability of a transverse chain, stretching continuously across this region, as has hitherto had a place on maps, under the title of the “Mountains of the Moon.”

No geological changes, except those due to the elevation of the oldest formations, appear to have taken place extensively in this continent. The shores of the Gulf of Guinea, and of the eastern regions, abound with gold, suggesting that their interior is not covered by modern rocks. The two extremities at Egypt and Cape of Good Hope, have been depressed to receive secondary and tertiary deposits. There may be other such instances; but the continent seems, during a time, even geologically long, to have formed a great compact mass of land, bearing the same relations as now to the rest of the world.

The valleys and precipices of South Africa have been shaped by the mighty currents which circulate round the promontory of the Cape; and the flat summit of Table Mountain, at the height of three thousand six hundred feet, is a rocky reef, worn and fretted into strange projections by the surge, which the southeasters brought against it, when it was at the level of the sea.

The present state of organized life in Africa tells the same tale. It indicates a land never connected with polar regions, nor subjected to great variations of temperature. Our continent, America, is a land of extremes of temperature. Corresponding to that condition, it is a land characterized by plants, the leaves of which ripen and fall, so that vegetation has a pause, waiting for the breath of spring. All the plants of southern Africa are evergreens. The large browsing animals, such as the elephant and rhinoceros, which cannot stoop to gather grass, find continuous subsistence in the continuous foliage of shrubs. America abounds with stags or deer—animals having deciduous horns or antlers. Southern Africa has none, but is rich in species of antelopes, which have true or permanent horns, and which nowhere sustain great variations of heat and cold. Its fossil plants correspond apparently in character to those which the country now bears.

Its fossil zoology offers very peculiar and interesting provinces of ancient life. These have been in positions not greatly unconformable to those of similar phenomena even now. Great inland fresh-water seas have abounded with new and strange types of organization, in character and office analogous to the amphibious forms occurring with profusion in similar localities of the present interior. These, and representatives of the secondary formations, rest chiefly on the old Silurian and Devonian series, the upheaving of which seems to have given the continent its place and outline. Coal is found at Natal, near the Mozambique Channel, but not hitherto known to be of value.

Africa still offers, and will long continue to offer, the most promising field of botanical discovery. Much novelty certainly remains to be elicited there, but it is very dilatory in finding its way abroad. Natal is the region most likely to be sedulously explored for some time. Vegetable ivory has been brought thence, and elastic, hard, useful timber abounds. Much lumber of good and varied character is taken to Europe from the western regions of the continent; but so greatly has scientific inquiry been repelled by the deadly climate, that even the species affording it are unknown, or doubtfully guessed at.

The vegetation of the south is brilliant, but not greatly useful. It affords the type of that which covers the mountains, receding towards the northeast, until they reach perpetual snow near the equator. That which is of a more tropical character, stretches round their bases and through their valleys, with its profusion of palms, creepers, and dye-woods. These hereafter will form the commercial wealth of the country, affording oil, india-rubber, dye-stuffs, and other useful productions.

The wild animals of Africa belong to plains and to loose thickets, rather than to timbered forests. There is a gradation in the height of the head, among the larger quadrupeds, which indicates the sort of country and of vegetation suitable to them.

The musket, with its “villanous saltpetre,” in the hands of barbarians is everywhere expelling from the earth its bulkier creatures, so that the elephant is disappearing, and ivory will become scarce. Fear tames the wildest nature; even the lion is timid when he has to face the musket. The dull ox has learned a lesson with regard to him; for when the kingly brute prowls round an unyoked wagon resting at night, and his growl or smell makes the oxen shake and struggle with terror, they are quieted by the discharge of firearms.

When Europeans first visited the shores of Africa, they were astonished at the tameness and abundance of unchecked animal life. The shallow bays and river lagoons were full of gigantic creatures; seals were found in great numbers, but of all animals these seem the most readily extirpated. The multitudes which covered the reefs of South Africa are nearly gone, and they seem to be no longer met with on the northern shores of the continent. The manatee, or sea-cow, and the hippopotamus, frequented the mouths of rivers, and were killed and eaten by the natives. They had never tamed and used the elephant: that this might have been done is inferred from the use of these animals by the Carthaginians. But as the Carthaginian territory was not African in the strict sense of the term, it may be doubted whether their species was that of Central Africa. This latter species is a larger, less intelligent looking, and probably a more stubborn creature than the Asiatic. The roundness of their foreheads and the size of their ears give them a duller and more brutal look; the magnitude of their tusks, and the occurrence of these formidable weapons in the female as well as in the male, are accommodated to the necessity of conflict with the lion, and indicate a wilder nature.

Lions of several species, abundance of panthers, cats, genets, and hyenas of many forms, mainly constitute the carnivorous province, having, as is suitable to the climate, a high proportion of the hyena form, or devourers of the dead. A foot of a pongo, or large ape, “as large as that of a man, and covered with hair an inch long,” astonished one of the earliest navigators. This animal, which indicates a zoological relationship to the Malayan islands, is known to afford the nearest approach to the human form. The monkey structure on the east coast of Africa tends to pass into the nocturnal or Lemurine forms of Madagascar, where the occurrence of an insulated Malayan language confirms the relationship indicated above.

The plains with bushy verdure nourish the ostrich and many species of bustards over the whole continent. Among the creatures which range far are the lammergeyer, or bearded eagle of the Alps, and the brown owl of Europe, extending to the extremity of the south. Among the parrots and the smaller birds, congregating species abound, forming a sort of arboreal villages, or joint-stock lodging-houses. Sometimes hundreds of such dwellings are under one thatch, the entrances being below. The weaving birds suspend their bottle-shaped habitations at the extremities of limber branches, where they wave in the wind. This affords security from monkeys and snakes; but they retain the instinct of forming them so when there is no danger from either the one or the other.

Reptiles abound in Africa. The Pythons (or Boas) are formidable. Of the species of serpents probably between one-fourth and one-fifth are poisonous; but every thing relating to them in the central regions requires to be ascertained. The Natal crocodile is smaller than the Egyptian, but is greatly dreaded.

The following instance of its ferocity occurred to the Rev. J. A. Butler, missionary, in crossing the Umkomazi River, in February, 1853. “When about two-thirds of the way across, his horse suddenly kicked and plunged as if to disengage himself from the rider, and the next moment a crocodile seized Mr. Butler’s thigh with his horrible jaws. The river at this place is about one hundred and fifty yards wide, if measured at right angles to the current; but from the place we entered to the place we go out, the distance is three times as great. The water at high tide, and when the river is not swollen, is from four to eight or ten feet deep. On each side the banks are skirted with high grass and reeds. Mr. Butler, when he felt the sharp teeth of the crocodile, clung to the mane of his horse with a death hold. Instantly he was dragged from the saddle, and both he and the horse were floundering in the water, often dragged entirely under, and rapidly going down the stream. At first the crocodile drew them again to the middle of the river, but at last the horse gained shallow water, and approached the shore. As soon as he was within reach natives ran to his assistance, and beat off the crocodile with spears and clubs. Mr. Butler was pierced with five deep gashes, and had lost much blood.”

[1] The author acknowledges his indebtedness for liberal and valuable contributions on the subject of Physical Geography, Geology, &c., to the Rev. Dr. Adamson, for twenty years a resident at the Cape of Good Hope, and government director and professor in the South African college. He wishes also to express his obligations for frequent suggestions from the same source on scientific subjects, during the preparation of this work.

CHAPTER V.

AFRICAN NATIONS—DISTRIBUTION OF RACES—ARTS—MANNERS AND CHARACTER—SUPERSTITIONS—TREATMENT OF THE DEAD—REGARD FOR THE SPIRITS OF THE DEPARTED—WITCHCRAFT—ORDEAL—MILITARY FORCE—AMAZONS—CANNIBALISM.

Whence came the African races, and how did they get where they are? These are questions not easily answered, and are such as might have been put with the same hesitation, and in view of the same puzzling circumstances, three thousand years ago. On the monuments of Thebes, in Upper Egypt, of the times of Thothmes III., three varieties of the African form of man are distinctly portrayed. There is the ruling race of Egypt, red-skinned and massy-browed. There are captives not unlike them, but of a paler color, with their hair tinged blue; and there is the negro, bearing his tribute of skins, living animals, and ivory; with the white eyeball, reclining forehead, woolly hair, and other normal characteristics of his type.

Provided that these representations are correct, and that the colors have not changed, the Egyptian has been greatly modified as to his tint of skin; whether we consider them as represented by the Copts, or the Fellahs of that country at present, the former bearing clearer traces of the more ancient form. The population of Africa, as it is at present, seems to be chiefly derivable from the other two races. There are, however, circumstances difficult to reconcile, in the present state of our knowledge, with any hypothesis as to the dispersion of man.

Southern and equatorial Africa includes tribes speaking dialects of two widely-spread tongues. One of them, the Zingian, or the Zambezan, is properly distinguished by the excess to which it carries repetition of certain signs of thought, giving to inflections a character different from what they exhibit in any other language. This tongue, however, bears, in other respects, a strong relationship to the many, but, perhaps, not mutually dissimilar dialects, of northern Africa. It may be considered as the form of speech belonging to the true or most normally developed African race.

The other of these two tongues offers also circumstances of peculiar interest. We may consider it, first, as it is found in use by the Hottentot or Bushman race, of South Africa. It has even among them regular and well-constructed forms of inflection, and as distinguishing it from the negro dialects, it has the sexual form of gender, or that which arises from the poetical or personifying view of all objects—considering them as endowed with life, and dividing them into males and females. In this respect it is analogous to the Galla, the Abyssinian, and the Coptic. Nay, at this distant extremity of Africa, not only is the form of gender thus the same with that of the people who raised the wonderful monuments of Egypt, but that monumental tongue has its signs of gender, or the terminations indicating that relation, identical with those of the Hottentot race.

We have, therefore, the evidence of a race of men, striking through the other darker ones, on perhaps nearly a central line, from one end of the continent to the other. The poor despised Bushman, forming for himself, with sticks and grass, a lair among the low-spreading branches of a protea, or nestling at sunset in a shallow hole, amid the warm sand of the desert, with wife and little ones like a covey of birds, sheltered by some ragged sheepskins from the dew of the clear sky, has an ancestral and mental relationship to the builder of the pyramids and the colossal temples of Egypt, and to the artists who adorned them. He looks on nature with a like eye, and stereotypes in his language the same conclusions derived from it. He has in his words vivified external things, as they did, according to that form which, in our more logical tongues, we name poetical metaphor. The sun—“Soorees”—is to him a female, the productive mother of all organic life; and rivers, as Kuis-eep, Gar-eep, are endowed with masculine activity and strength.

To this scattered family of man, which ought properly to be called the Ethiopic race, as distinguished from the negro, may probably be ascribed the fierce invasions from the centre, eastward and westward, under the names of Galla Giagas, and other appellations, which occasionally convulsed both sides of Africa; and, perhaps, by intermixture of races, gave occasion to much of the diversity found among native tribes, in disposition, manners, and language. The localities occupied by it have become insulated through the intrusion of the negro. Its southern division, or the Hottentot tribes, were being pressed off into an angle, and apparently in the process of extinction or absorption by the Zambezan Kaffirs from the north and east, when Europeans met and rolled them away into a small corner of desert.

Egypt was evidently the artery through which population poured into the broad expanse of Africa. That the progenitors of the negro race first entered there, and that another race followed subsequently, is one mode of disposing of the question, which, however, only removes its difficulties a little farther back.

This supposition is unnecessary. Any number of human families living together, comprises varieties of constitution, affording a source from which, by the force of external circumstances, the extreme variations may be educed. If we examine critically the representations of the oldest inhabitants of Egypt, we shall see in the form of man which they exhibit, a combination of characteristics, or a provision for breaking into varieties corresponding to the conditions of external nature in the interior regions.

The dissatisfied, the turbulent, the defeated and the criminal would in these earliest times be thrown off from a settled community in Egypt, to penetrate into the southern and western regions. They would generally die there. Many ages of such attempts might pass before those individuals reached the marshes of the great central plateau, whose constitutions suited that position. Many of them, moreover, would die childless. Early death to the adult, and certain death to the immature, would sweep families off, as the streams bounding from southern Atlas intrude on the desert, and perish there. The many immigrants to whom all external things were adverse would be constantly weeded out; so it would be for generation after generation, until the few remained, whom heat, exposure, toil, marsh vapor, and fever left as an assorted and acclimated root of new nations.

Such seems to have been the process in Africa by which a declension of our nature took place from Egypt in two directions; one through the central plains down to the marshes of the Gaboon or the Congo river, where the aberrant peculiarities of the negro seem most developed; and the other along the mountains, by the Nile and the Zambeze, until the Ethiopian sank into the Hottentot.

The sea does not deal kindly with Africa, for it wastes or guards the shores with an almost unconquerable surf. Tides are small, and rivers not safely penetrable. The ocean offered to the negro nothing but a little food, procured with some trouble and much danger. Hence ocean commerce was unknown to them. Only in the smallest and most wretched canoes did they venture forth to catch a few fish. If strangers sought for regions of prosperity, riches, or powerful government, their views were directed to the interior. Benin, in 1484, confessed its subordination to a great internal sovereign, who only gave responses from behind a curtain, or permitted one of his feet to be visible to his dependents, as a mark of gracious favor. It was European commerce in gold and slaves, received for the coveted goods and arms they bought, which ultimately gave these monarchs an interest in the sea-shore.

Cruelty and oppression were everywhere, as they still are. It is not easy for us to conceive how a living man can be moulded to the unhesitating submission in which a negro subject lives, so that it should be to him a satisfaction to live and die, or suffer or rejoice, just as his sovereign wills. It can be accounted for only from the prevalence and the desolating fury of wars, which rendered perfect uniformity of will and movement indispensable for existence. It is not so easy to offer any probable reason for the eagerness to share in cruelty which glows in a negro’s bosom. Its appalling character consisted rather in the amount of bloodshed which gratified the negro, than in the studious prolongation of pain. He offers in this respect a contrast to the cold, demoniac vengeance of the North American Indian. Superstition probably excused or justified to him some of his worst practices. Human sacrifices have been common everywhere. There was no scruple at cruelty when it was convenient. The mouths of the victims were gagged by knives run through their cheeks; and captives among the southern tribes were beaten with clubs in order to prevent resistance, or “to take away their strength,” as the natives expressed it, that they might be more easily hurried to the “hill of death,” or authorized place of execution.

The negro arts are respectable, and would have been more so had not disturbance and waste come with the slave-trade. They weave coarse narrow cloths, and dye them. They work in wood and metals. The gold chains obtained at Wydah, of native manufacture, are well wrought. Nothing can be more correctly formed for its purpose than the small barbed lancet-looking point of a Bushman’s arrow. Those who shave their heads or beards have a neat, small razor, double-edged, or shaped like a shovel. Arts improve from the coast towards the northeast.

Their normal form of a house is round, with a conical roof. The pastoral people of the south have it of a beehive form, covered with mats; the material is rods and flags. If the whole negro nations, however, were swept away, there would not remain a monument on the face of their continent to tell that such a race of men had occupied it.

One curious relation to external nature seems to have prevailed throughout all Africa, consisting in a special reverence, among different tribes, for certain selected objects. From one of these objects the tribe frequently derives its national appellation: if it is a living thing, they avoid killing it or using it as food. Serpents, particularly the gigantic pythons or boas, are everywhere reverenced. Some traces of adoration offered to the sun have been met with on the west coast; but, generally speaking, the superstitions of Africa are far less intellectual. These and many of their other practices have a common characteristic in the disappearance of all trace of their origin among the tribes observing them. To all inquiries they have the answer ready, that their fathers did so. There is in this, however, no great assurance of real antiquity, for tradition extends but a short way back.

A reliance on grisgris, or amulets, worn about the person, belongs to Africa, perhaps from very ancient ages. Egypt was probably its source: a kind of literary character has been given to it by the Mohammedans. Throughout inland central Africa, sentences written on scraps of paper or parchment have a marketable value. An impostor or devotee may gain authority and profit in this way. As we pass southward we find this superstition sinking lower and lower in debasement: men there really cover or load themselves with all kinds of trumpery, and have a real and hearty confidence in bones, buttons, scraps, or almost any conceivable thing, as a security against any conceivable evil. The Kroomen, even, with their purser’s names, of Jack Crowbar, Head Man, and Flying-Jib, Bottle of Beer, Pea Soup, Poor Fellow, Prince Will, and others, taken on board the “Perry,” in Monrovia, were found now and then with their sharks’, tigers’ and panthers’ teeth, and small shells, on their ankles and wrists; although most of these people, from contact with the Liberians, have seen the folly of this practice, and dispensed with their charms.

The Africans also have stationary fetishes, consisting in sacred places and sacred things. They have practices to inspire terror, or gain reverence in respect to which it is somewhat difficult to decide whether the actors in them are impostors or sincere. Idols in the forms of men, rude and frightful enough, are among these fetishes, but it cannot be said that idolatry of this kind prevails extensively in the country.

In two respects they look towards the invisible: they dread a superhuman power, and they fear and worship it as being a measureless source of evil. It is scarcely correct to call this Devil-worship, for this is a title of contrast, presuming that there has been a choice of the evil in preference to the good. The fact in their case seems to be, that good in will, or good in action, are ideas foreign to their minds. Selfishness cannot be more intense, nor more exclusive of all kindness and generosity or charitable affection, than it is generally found among these barbarians. The inconceivableness of such motives to action has often been found a strong obstacle to the influence of the Christian missionary. They can worship nothing good, because they have no expectation of good from any thing powerful. They have mysterious words or mutterings, equivalent to what we term incantations, which is the meaning of the Portuguese word from which originated the term fetish.

The other reference of their intellect to invisible things consists in acknowledging the continued existence of the dead, and paying reverence to the spirits of their forefathers. This leads to great cruelty. Men of rank at their death are presumed to require attendance, and be gratified with companionship. This event, therefore, produces the murder of wives and slaves, to afford them suitable escort and service in the other world. From the strange mixture of the material and spiritual common to men in that barbarian condition, the bodies or the blood of the slain appear to be the essentials of these requirements. Thus, also, the utmost horror is felt at decapitation, or at the severing of limbs from the body after death. It is revenge, as much as desire to perpetuate the remembrance of victory, which makes them eager for the skulls and jaw-bones of their enemies, so that in a royal metropolis, walls, and floors, and thrones, and walking-sticks, are everywhere lowering with the hollow eyes of the dead. These sad, bare and whitened emblems of mortality and revenge present a curious and startling spectacle, cresting and festooning the red clay walls of Kumassi, the Ashantee capital.

Such belief leads to strange vagaries in practice. They sympathize with the departed, as subject still to common wants and ruled by common affections. A negro man of Tahou would show his regard for the desires of the dead by sitting patiently to hold a spread umbrella over the head of a corpse. The dead man’s mouth, too, was stuffed with rice and fowl, and in cold weather a fire was kept burning in the hut for the benefit of their deceased friend. They consulted his love of ornament, also, for the top of his head and his brow were stained red, his nose and cheeks yellow, and the lower jaw white; and fantastic figures of different colors were daubed over his black body.

Dingaan, the Zulu chief, was exceedingly fond of ornament. He used to boast that the Zulus were the only people who understood dress. Sometimes he came forward painted with all kinds of stripes and crosses, in a very bizarre style. The people took all this gravely, saying that “he was king and could do what he pleased,” and they were content with his taste. It is this unreflecting character which astounds us in savages. They never made it a question whether the garniture of the king or of the corpse had any thing unsuitable.

All along the coasts, from the equator to the north of the Gulf of Guinea, they did not eat without throwing a portion on the ground for those who had died. Sometimes they dug a small hole for these purposes, or they had one in the hut, and into it they poured what they thought would be acceptable. They conceived that they had sensible evidence of the inclinations of the dead. In lifting up or carrying a corpse on their shoulders, men may not attend to the exact direction of their own muscular movements or those of their associates. There are necessarily shocks, jolts and struggles, from the movements of their associates. People will, in some cases, pull different ways when hustled together. All these unconscious movements, not unlike the “table turnings” of the present era, were taken as expressive of the will of the dead man, as to how and whither he was to be carried.

Their belief, as we have seen, influenced their life: it was earnest and heartfelt. When the king of Wydah, in 1694, heard that Smith, the chief of the English factory, was dangerously ill with fever, he sent his fetishman to aid in the recovery. The priest went to the sick man, and solemnly announced that he came to save him. He then marched to the white man’s burial-ground with a provision of brandy, oil, and rice, and made a loud oration to those that slept there. “O you dead white people, you wish to have Smith among you; but our king likes him, and it is not his will to let him go to be among you.” Passing on to the grave of Wyburn, the founder of the factory, he addressed him, “You, captain of all the whites who are here! Smith’s sickness is a piece of your work. You want his company, for he is a good man; but our king does not want to lose him, and you can’t have him yet.” Then digging a hole over the grave, he poured into it the articles which he had brought, and told him that if he needed these things, he gave them with good-will, but he must not expect to get Smith. The factor died, notwithstanding. The ideas here are not very dissimilar to those of the old Greeks.

It is remarkable, however, that in tracing this negro race along the continent towards the south, we find these notions and practices to fade away, and at last disappear. Southeast of the desert, along the Orange River, there is scarcely a trace of them.

The dread of witchcraft prevails universally. In general, the occurrence of disease is ascribed to this source. In the north they fear a supernatural influence; in the south this is traced to no superhuman origin, but is conceived to be a power which any one may possess and exercise. Among these tribes, the man presumed to be guilty of this crime is a public enemy (as were the witches occasionally found among our own venerated pious, and public-spirited puritan forefathers—a blemish in their character due to the general ignorance of the age), to be removed if possible, as a lion, tiger, or pestilence would be annihilated. Even the force of civilized law, when introduced among them, has not saved a man under this stigma from being secretly murdered by the terrified people. It has yielded only to the enlightening influence of Christian missionaries.

These delusions are often rendered the support of tyranny by the chiefs, for the property of the accused is confiscated. Scenes sad and horrible are exhibited as the consequence of a chief’s illness. In order to force a discovery of the means employed, and to get the witchcraft counteracted, some native, who is generally rich enough to be worth plundering, is seized and tortured, until, as an old author expresses it, “he dies, or the chief recovers.” They extend the horror of the infliction, by calling in the aid of vermin life, destined in nature to devour corruption, by scattering handfuls of ants over the scorched skin and quivering flesh of their victim.

Generally among the Guinea negroes, the ordeal employed to detect this crime, is to compel the accused to drink a decoction of sassy-wood. This may be rendered harmless or destructive, according to the object of the fetishman. It is oftener his purpose to destroy than to save, and great cruelty has in almost all cases been found to accompany the trial.

Plunder is the reward of the soldier. In the central regions this was increased by the sale of captives. Captives of both sexes were the chief’s property. Thus the warriors looked to the acquisition of wives from the chief, as the recompense of successful wars. They announced this as their aim in their preparatory songs. The chief was, therefore, to them the source of every thing. Their whole thought responded to his movements, and sympathized with his greatness and success.

Women in Africa are everywhere slaves, or the slaves of slaves. The burdens of agricultural labor fall on them. When a chief is announced as having hundreds or thousands of wives, it signifies really that he has so many female slaves. There does not appear to be any tribe in Africa, in which it is not the rule of society, that a man may have as many such wives as he can procure. The number is of course, except in the case of the supreme chief, but few. The female retinue of a sovereign partakes everywhere of the reverence due to its head. The chief and his household are a kind of divinity to the people. His name is the seal of their oath. The possibility of his dying must never be expressed, nor the name of death uttered in his presence. Names of things appearing to interfere with the sacredness of his, must be changed. His women must not be met or looked at.

In war, as long as success depends alone on individual prowess, the strong and athletic only can be successful soldiers. Where the weapons, rather than the person are the source of power, docility and endurance are qualities more valuable than strength. In these the weaker sex, in savage life, surpasses the other; hence women have appeared in the world as soldiers. It was probably the introduction of the arrow, killing at a distance, as superior in effect and safety to the rude clubs and spears of earlier conflict, which originated the Amazons of old history. The same fact is resulting in Africa from the introduction of the musket. Females thus armed were found, commonly as royal guards, in the beginning of the last century. The practice still continues in the central regions.

In Dahomey a considerable proportion of the national troops consists of armed and disciplined females. They are known as being royal women, strictly and watchfully kept from any communication with men, and seem to have been trained, through discipline and the force of co-operation, to the accomplishment of enterprises, from which the tumultuous warriors of a native army would shrink. A late English author (Duncan) says, “I have seen them, all well armed, and generally fine, strong, healthy women, and doubtless capable of enduring great fatigue. They seem to use the long Danish musket with as much ease as one of our grenadiers does his firelock, but not of course with the same quickness, as they are not trained to any particular exercise; but on receiving the word, make an attack like a pack of hounds, with great swiftness. Of course they would be useless against disciplined troops, if at all approaching to the same numbers. Still their appearance is more martial than the generality of the men, and if undertaking a campaign, I should prefer the female to the male soldiers of this country.”

The same author thus describes a field review of these Amazons, which he witnessed: “I was conducted to a large space of broken ground, where fourteen days had been occupied in erecting three immense prickly piles of green bush. These three clumps or piles, of a sort of strong brier or thorn, armed with the most dangerous prickles, were placed in line, occupying about four hundred yards, leaving only a narrow passage between them, sufficient merely to distinguish each clump appointed to each regiment. These piles were about seventy feet wide and eight feet high. Upon examining them, I could not persuade myself that any human being without boots or shoes would, under any circumstances, attempt to pass over so dangerous a collection of the most efficiently armed plants I had ever seen.”

The Amazons wear a blue striped cotton surtout, manufactured by the natives, and a pair of trowsers falling just below the knee. The cartridge-box is girded around the loins.

The drums and trumpets soon announced the approach of three or four thousand Amazons. “The Apadomey soldiers (female) made their appearance at about two hundred yards from, or in front of, the first pile, where they halted with shouldered arms. In a few seconds the word for attack was given, and a rush was made towards the pile with a speed beyond conception, and in less than one minute the whole body had passed over this immense pile, and had taken the supposed town. Each of the other piles was passed with the same rapidity, at intervals of twenty minutes.” “When a person is killed in battle, the skin is taken from the head, and kept as a trophy of valor. I counted seven hundred scalps pass in this manner. The captains of each corps (female), in passing, again presented themselves before his majesty, and received the king’s approval of their conduct.” These heroines, however, say that they are no longer women, but men.

The people of Ashantee and Dahomey are considerably in advance of those on the coast. They cultivate the soil extensively, manufacture cotton cloth, and build comparatively good houses. They have musical instruments, which, if rude, are loud enough. Their drums and horns add to the stateliness of their ceremonies. Of such exhibitions they are very fond, and consider it a national honor if they can render them impressive to strangers. The Dahomeans are about one hundred miles in the interior, west of the Niger.

Necessity has occasionally driven some of the southern tribes to adopt the practice of cannibalism. There it has ever excited horror and disgust. Those who have practised it are distinguished by an appellation setting them apart from other men. Among some of the central tribes it has prevailed rather, however, in all appearance, from superstitious motives, or as an exhibition of triumphant revenge, than in the revolting form which it assumes among some of the Polynesian islanders.

CHAPTER VI.

TRADE—METALS—MINES—VEGETABLE PRODUCTIONS—GUMS—OIL—COTTON—DYE-STUFFS.

The trade of Africa for an almost indefinite time must consist of the materials for manufactures.

The fact that old formations reposing on granite, or distorted by it, form a large proportion of its geological surface, indicates that useful metals will probably be found in abundance. In comparing it with California and Australia as to the probability of finding deposits of the more valuable metals, two circumstances of great importance must be kept in view. These countries were possessed by natives who had no domesticated animals, and therefore were not called upon to exercise over the soil the same inquisitive inspection for herbage and water as were required from the races among the mountains and deserts of Africa, so that the chances of finding any thing were not the same.

The other circumstance is, that metals were comparatively little known to the aborigines of California, and not at all to those of New Holland, so that discoveries of the kind would neither be sought for, nor reckoned of much value when they occurred. On the other hand, metals of all kinds have during indefinite eras been regarded as of high importance, and have been used in various ways by the African nations. Copper, and some alloys of it, seem to be used for ornaments throughout the whole south. These are smelted from the ores by the natives. They also manufacture their own iron. Their desires, therefore, and their necessities, and their arts, render it probable that no deposits of metals exist, except such as require scientific skill to discover, and mechanical resources to procure.

Gold is not in this predicament. Wherever it occurs in abundance, it has been collected by elemental waste from disintegrated rocks, and is mixed with gravel and alluvial matters in those portions where men of nomadic habits, and familiar with metal ornaments, would most readily meet and appropriate it. Some, probably a great proportion, of the gold of ancient Egypt, was got by a laborious process of grinding, on which their wretched captives were employed. This would not have been the case if the metal had been found plentifully throughout the extensive regions with which they were acquainted.

An addition to the metallic riches of the world from Africa, is therefore to be looked for in the discovery of deep-seated mines, if there are any, and in better modes of working those which exist, particularly the alluvial deposits of gold along the northern shores of the Gulf of Guinea and the shores of the Mozambique Channel. The present export of gold from all Africa, probably amounts to about two millions of dollars per annum.

The vegetable articles of export are of great value. Cotton may be produced in unlimited abundance. The African dye-stuffs are already recognized as extensive and valuable articles of commerce. Indigo is used extensively by the natives. When we recollect that the vast trade of Bengal in this article has been created within the memory of men still living, and that India possesses no natural advantages beyond those of Africa, we may infer what a profusion of wealth might be poured rapidly over Africa by peace and good government.

Gums, of various kinds, constitute a branch of trade which may be considered as only commencing. The extensive employment of india-rubber, and the knowledge of gutta-percha, are only a few years old. Africa gives promise of a large supply of such articles. Its caoutchouc has already been introduced into the arts.[2] It may be long before the natural sources of supply found in its marshy forests can be exhausted. Be that as it may; when men are induced, as perhaps they soon will be, to substitute regular cultivation for the wild and more irregular modes of procuring articles which are becoming every day of more essential importance, Africa may take a great share in the means adopted to supply them.

Palm-oil has become pre-eminently an object of attention. The modes of procuring it are very rude and wasteful. The palm-nuts are generally left for a day or two, heaped together in a hole dug in the ground. They are then trodden by the women, till they form a greasy pulp; out of this the oil is rudely strained through their fingers, or water is run into the hole to float the oil, and it is skimmed off with their hands into a calabash. In Benin they employ the better mode of boiling it off. The oil occurs in a kind of pulp surrounding the seed, as is the case with the eatable part of the common date; it is evident, therefore, that more suitable modes of producing it may be put in practice.

What may be done in the production of sugar and coffee, no man can tell. James Macqueen, who has, during great part of his life, devoted his attention to the condition and interests of Africa, gave evidence before a committee of the British House of Peers, in 1850, to the following effect: “There is scarcely any tropical production known in the world, which does not come to perfection in Africa. There are many productions which are peculiarly her own. The dye-stuffs and dye-woods are superior to any which are known in any other quarter of the world, inasmuch as they resist both acids and light, things which we know no other dye-stuffs, from any other parts of the world, can resist. Then there is the article of sugar, that can be produced in every part of Africa to an unlimited extent. There is cotton also, above all things—cotton of a quality so fine; it is finer cotton than any description of cotton we know of in the world. Common cotton in Africa I have seen, and had in my possession, which was equal to the finest quality of American cotton.

“Egyptian cotton is not so good as the cotton away to the south; but the cotton produced in the southern parts of Africa is peculiarly fine. Africa is a most extraordinary country. In the eastern horn of Africa, which you think to be a desolate wilderness, there is the finest country, and the finest climate I know. I know of none in South America equal to the climate of the country in the northeastern horn of Africa. It is a very elevated country; and on the upper regions you have all the fruits, and flowers, and grain of Europe growing; and in the valleys you have the finest fruits of the torrid zone. The whole country is covered with myrrh and frankincense; it is covered with flocks and herds; it produces abundance of the finest grain. Near Brasa, for instance, on the river Webbe, you can purchase as much fine wheat for a dollar as will serve a man for a year. All kinds of European grain flourish there. In Enarea and Kaffa, the whole country is covered with coffee; it is the original country of the coffee. You can purchase an ass’s load (200 lbs.) of coffee in the berry for about a dollar. The greater portion of the coffee that we receive from Mocha, is actually African coffee, produced in that part.”

[2] The Rev. J. Leighton Wilson, who was a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, at Cape Palmas and at the Gaboon River for more than twenty years, first called attention to a vine, or creeper, as affording india-rubber. It is now collected from this plant in the Gaboon district; and two or three cargoes have already been shipped to this country, with a prospect of its becoming a lucrative article of trade. We may look to intelligent missionaries, like Mr. Wilson, for securing such benefits to traffic and art, as well as to science and literature. We are glad to learn that he contemplates an extended work on Africa, which will no doubt be highly acceptable to the public.

CHAPTER VII.

EUROPEAN COLONIES—PORTUGUESE—REMAINING INFLUENCE OF THE PORTUGUESE—SLAVE FACTORIES—ENGLISH COLONIES—TREATIES WITH THE NATIVE CHIEFS—INFLUENCE OF SIERRA LEONE—DESTRUCTION OF BARRACOONS—INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND—CHIEFS ON THE COAST—ASHANTEE—KING OF DAHOMEY.

The Portuguese commercial discoverers having succeeded those of France, and founded trading establishments on the coast of Africa, were driven from the sea-shore by the rivalry and power of the Dutch and the English, about the year 1604. They retired into the interior, and commingled with the negroes. From their intermarriages arose a race of mulattoes, who have long exercised considerable influence. As early as 1667, this influence had become detrimental to commerce and discovery. They closed against others the entrances to the great region of more elevated lands, and carried on trade, without rivals, from Benin to Senegambia, over two thousand miles. They had generally little chapels near their houses, and spared no pains to make proselytes.

How much might these men have done for the good of Africa and the progress of the world! Following their lines of commerce, and cresting the high lands, which feed, with rains and rivulets, the Gambia and the Niger, as well as the streams by which they dwell, they might have saved two centuries of doubt and hazardous attempts, and much sacrifice of good and talented men. They might earlier have let in Christian civilization to repel the Moslem and redeem the negro. Portuguese influence is gone, and has left the world little reason to regret its extinction. On the rising and almost impervious forest-lands which are at the distance of from twenty to fifty miles back from the coast, these Portuguese mulattoes are still found, watching for their monopoly, with the same jealous exclusiveness as of old. These forests thus inhabited, form, at present, a serious obstacle to the extension of the influence of Liberia. An enterprising people, however, occupying the great tracts of cleared lands along the coast, which constitute the actual territories of the republic, will, with the progress of the settlements, and the increase of their power, soon be enabled, notwithstanding the short navigable distance of the rivers, to open communication with the far interior.

The Portuguese founded cities and missions. A more extensive authority was gained by them over great and populous regions, both on the eastern and western shores, than has been attained by any other people. The title of “Lord of Guinea” was fairly claimed for the King of Portugal, by the establishment of this sovereign’s supremacy over various native kingdoms. But Portugal wanted the light and strength of a nation—a righteous and intelligent policy.

The establishments on the east coast now scarcely keep their ground, ever shrinking before the barbarian and the Arab. St. Paul de Loando, on the southwest coast, is shrivelled down from its former greatness. Both regions have rich capabilities; both might have extended a useful influence, until they met and embraced in the centre, uniting these vast regions with the great movements of human progress; but they clung to the slave-trade, and its curse has clung to them.

They misunderstood human nature, and overlooked its high destiny. Of the Spaniards and Portuguese concerned in slaving, Captain Dunlop, of the British Navy, long attached to the English squadron on the African coast, says: “They speak of the African as a brute, who is only fit to be made a slave of, and say that it is quite chimerical and absurd in us to attempt to put down the trade, or to defend men who were only born to be slaves.”

Other nations only founded slave factories. Every thing peculiar to this influence was bad. Compared with the ounces of gold and tusks of ivory which drew the cupidity of early navigators, there arose everywhere a traffic, far more rapid, but it was that of cruelty, bringing with it vice. Brandy and arms, drunkenness and war, followed as the remuneration of rapine and slaving. The gross vices of Europe added to the mischief. Legitimate trade, which might have flourished for centuries, withered; and the rank which the white man held among the natives, made him a source of wide corruption. Little good could come out of the state of society in Europe during the last century, for little good was in it. This state of things has improved.

The three nations whose interference seems likely to have a conspicuous effect upon the interests of Africa in the future, are France, England, and the United States.

France will have all the Mediterranean shore, and the caravan trade across the deserts. But this will diminish in activity and value, as the trade of the other shores extends, and as the way across from them to the interior becomes easier. No great influence can, therefore, be in this way exercised over the prosperity of the African people.

England holds the south; but the natives around the Cape of Good Hope are greatly isolated from the interior by deserts and climates hostile to European life. Democracy has a footing there, inasmuch as Dutch colonists have retired from under English jurisdiction, and formed a government for themselves, which has been acknowledged by England. After suffering, and trial, and privation shall have taught independence of thought and patriotism, a respectable confederacy of states may be formed in these regions.

Every effort that is just and suitable, is made to extend English influence along the shores of negro lands. The expenditure in endeavoring to extirpate the slave-trade is very great; and great devotedness and heroism have been seen in attempts to explore the interior. Both objects are drawing towards completion; but the permanently beneficial influence of England rests on the establishment of Sierra Leone and the extended coasting trade, arising from the semi-monthly line of English steamers which touch there.

England has established twenty-four treaties with native kings, chiefs, or powers, for the suppression of the slave-trade; seventeen of these are with chiefs whose territories have fallen under the influence of the Republic of Liberia and Cape Palmas. The influence of these governments has now replaced that of England, by sweeping the slave-trade from their territory of about six hundred miles. The great proportion of recaptured slaves, chiefly men and boys, who have been thrown into the population of Sierra Leone, has loaded it heavily. Of these, altogether not less than sixty thousand have, at different times, been introduced; yet, with the original colonists—the Novascotians, Canadians and the Maroons from Jamaica—the whole do not now extend beyond forty-five thousand; still, Sierra Leone has long been a focus of good emanations. It embraces a territory small compared with Liberia. The government is repressive of native energy, on account of the constant superintendence of white men, and the subordination of the colony to a distant and negligent government.

One momentous effect of its influence, however, has come permanently forward, tending to carry rapid improvement widely over the western regions of Africa. These recaptured slaves, and their descendants, many of them, are returning to their native lands, elevated in character by the instruction they have received. Three thousand of them are now settled among their brethren of the Yoruba tribe, near the mouth of the Niger, and there, superintended by two or three missionaries, are sending abroad, by their influence and example, the light of Divine truth.

Sierra Leone and the naval squadrons have rendered great service to Liberia. It is perfectly obvious that the colony could not have existed if left to itself under the old system of pirating and slave-trading. Those who did not spare European forts, would have had no scruple at plundering and extinguishing such opponents of their traffic. It must in justice be admitted, that a fair surrender of what might, in reality, be considered as conquered territory, has been made by England to Liberia. The instances of such transactions show a greatly advanced state of morality in the public dealings of nations, and in this, even, the African has begun to partake.

Sierra Leone was founded on the 9th of May, 1787, by a party of four hundred negroes, discharged from the army and navy. They were joined by twelve hundred from Nova Scotia in 1792.

In 1849, the country around the river Sherboro, intervening between Sierra Leone and Monrovia, had been carrying on a war for about seven years, and at length commenced plundering the canoes of the Sierra Leone people. The acting governor soon brought them to terms. This vexed the slavers at the Gallinas, who had long been an annoyance to the Liberian authorities. It was the slavers’ policy to keep up the excitement and strife, that they might in the mean time drive a brisk trade unmolested.

The English cruisers at length blockaded the Gallinas. They ascertained that, notwithstanding the blockade, abundance of goods were received by the enemy. The mystery was at length solved by discovering that the slave-traders, through small creeks and lagoons, had received what they wanted from Sierra Leone. The case was referred to the governor to have this prevented, and by the governor it was referred to the lawyers. They shook their wigs solemnly over the complaint, and decided that nothing within the compass of the law suited the case, and therefore nobody could interfere.

Captain Dunlop, in command of the cruisers, a good naval diplomatist, ready in the cause of justice and humanity to make precedents where none could be found, informed the Sherboro chiefs, that a treaty existed between them and his government for the suppression of the slave-trade; and suggested to them the virtue and the profit of seizing the goods brought from Sierra Leone. The chiefs had the smallest possible objections which honest men could have, to appropriate the slavers’ goods to themselves. On the principle of employing a thief in office for the moral benefit of his companions, this matter was easily settled. The goods were seized in their transit. It was also stipulated with these chiefs, that they should stop all trade and intercourse between their own people and the slave barracoons. Having now no chance of sending off slaves, and no means of getting any thing from Sierra Leone or elsewhere, the slavers, established at the Gallinas—regarded for the present as no man’s land—were obliged to come to terms.

Captain Dunlop landed to receive their surrender. But to spare his own men in the sickliest season of the year, he applied to a chief for one hundred and fifty hands; these he obtained, and soon after three hundred more joined him, and remained for the five or six weeks, while the affair was being settled. These men behaved as well as disciplined troops, or rather better, for although among an enemy’s property, there was no drunkenness or plunder.

An idea of the extent of the slave-establishment may be had from the fact that sixty foreigners were made prisoners. They hailed from everywhere, and were sent to Sierra Leone to find passage to Brazil, Cuba and other places.

The chiefs who had been in partnership with them, found themselves none the worse for this summary breaking up of the firm. They cleared off their national debt. In the way of trade they had come under obligations to this establishment to the extent of seven thousand slaves, and they found themselves at liberty honestly to “repudiate,” or rather their obligation was discharged, as slaves were no longer a lawful tender. The chiefs, however, were required to set at liberty all slaves collected but not delivered. These amounted to about a thousand. A preparation was here made for the extension of Liberia, and afterwards, as will be seen, that government came into possession of this territory, and thus secured a still greater extent of coast from the intrusion of the slaver.

English influence is extending by means of factories and agents all along the coast, from Cape Palmas to the Gaboon (about twelve hundred miles), for commercial purposes and for the suppression of the slave-trade. These establishments are supported by the government. Commissioners proceed from them to enter into negotiations on the subject of the slave-trade with the powerful chiefs of the interior, and curious results sometimes occur from the prestige thus gained.

One of the great Ashantee chiefs came over to the English, during the war in which Sir Charles McCarthy was killed, and retained his independence on the borders of the two powers. Governor McLean, at Cape Coast Castle, learnt that this chief had offered human sacrifices as one of his “customs.” A summons, in a legal form, was dispatched to him by a native soldier, citing him to appear for trial for this offence. Agreeably to the summons, he marched to the court in great state, surrounded by his chiefs and attendants. He was tried, convicted, and heavily fined. He was then dismissed, with an order to remit the money. This he immediately did, although there was no force, except moral supremacy, to constrain him to obey. There has been no slaving at Cape Coast Castle since the trade was abolished forty years ago.

There are only forty British officers’ and soldiers in all the line of forts, with one hundred of the West India regiment, and about fifty native militia-men. The annual expense of the establishments is about twenty thousand dollars; although, as the government has lately purchased, for fifty thousand dollars, the Danish forts, the expense will be materially increased.

The interior is improving. Captain Winniet visited Ashantee in October, 1849. He found on the route large thriving additional villages, as far as English protection extended. He was received at Kumassi with the usual display of African music, musketry, and marching. He was led for a mile and a half through a lane at heads and shoulders, clustered thick on both sides. There were here and there diverging branches of a like character, as thick with heads and shoulders; and at the end of each, a chief sitting in his chair of state. To and by each chief, a hand was waved as a salutation, until the monarch himself was reached. He rose, came forward, and, with heavy lumps of gold dangling at his wrists, exhibited his agility in dancing. When this act of state ceremony had been properly done up, he offered his hand to shake, and thus completed the etiquette of a reception at court. The houses, with piazzas projecting to shelter them from the sun—public-rooms in front, and dwelling-rooms behind, nicely plastered and colored—were greatly admired.

The pleading about the slave-trade was the main business and the main difficulty; but the nature of such negotiations appears, in its most impressive aspect, in the case of Dahomey.

This chief professes great devotedness to England. In consequence of some difficulty, he gave notice to European foreigners, “that he was not much accustomed to cut off white heads, but if any interfered with an agent of the English government, he would cut off their heads as readily as those of his black people.” By murderous incursions against his neighbors, he seized about nine thousand victims annually. He sold about three thousand of these directly on his own account, gave the rest chiefly away to his troops, who sold them: a duty of five dollars being paid on each slave exported, afforded him altogether a revenue of about three hundred thousand dollars.

This was a serious matter to argue against. He stated the case strongly: “The form of my government cannot be suddenly changed without causing such a revolution as would deprive me of my throne, and precipitate the kingdom into anarchy.... I am very desirous to acquire the friendship of England. I and my army are ready, at all times, to fight the queen’s enemies, and do any thing the English government may ask of me, except to give up the slave-trade. No other trade is known to my people. Palm-oil, it is true, is engaging the attention of some of them, but it is a slow method of making money, and brings only a very small amount of duties into my coffers. The planting of cotton and coffee has been suggested, but that is slower still. The trees have to grow, and I shall probably be in my grave before I reap any benefit from them; and what am I to do in the mean time? Who will pay my troops in the mean time? Who will buy arms and clothes for them? Who will buy dresses for my wives? Who will give me supplies of cowries, rum, gunpowder and cloth, for my annual ‘customs?’ I hold my power by the observance of the time-honored customs of my forefathers. I should forfeit it, and entail on myself a life full of shame, and a death full of misery, by neglecting them. The slave-trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories, and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Can I, by signing such a treaty, change the sentiments of a whole people? It cannot be!”

The case was a puzzling one for this intelligent, open-hearted, and ambitious barbarian. He had trained an army of savage heroes, and as savage heroines, thirsting for distinction and for plunder. This army cowers at his feet as long as he satiates its appetite for excitement, rapine and blood. But woe to him if it turn in disappointed fury upon him! Such is military despotism; perilous to restrain, and perilous to let loose. Blessed is that people which is clear of it!

There is this strange incident in the affair, that the English power, which sent an ambassador to plead the case with him in this peaceful mode, was at the same time covering the sea with cruisers, and lining the shore with factories, and combining every native influence to extinguish the sole source from which flowed the security and splendor of his rule. He knew this, and could offer no moral objection to it, although complaining of the extent to which it reduced his authority, and crippled his resources.

The urgency to which the King of Dahomey was subjected, ended, in 1852, in his yielding. England had proposed to pay him some annual sum for a time, as a partial compensation for the loss of his revenue: it may therefore be presumed that he is a stipendiary of the British government; and as the practices given up by him can scarcely, in any circumstances, be suddenly revived, his interest will retain him faithful to the engagement. It is a strange, bold, and perilous undertaking, that he should direct his disciplined army, his hero and his heroine battalions, to the arts of peace! But to these he and they must henceforward look as the source of their wealth, security, and greatness.

Queen Victoria, it is said, has lately sent the King of Dahomey two thousand ornamental caps for the Amazon soldiers.

CHAPTER VIII.

DAHOMEY—SLAVISH SUBJECTION OF THE PEOPLE—DEPENDENCE OF THE KING ON THE SLAVE-TRADE—EXHIBITION OF HUMAN SKULLS—ANNUAL HUMAN SACRIFICES—LAGOS—THE CHANGES OF THREE CENTURIES.

Dalziel, in slave-trading times, shocked the world with details in reference to Dahomey. Duncan and Forbes have again presented the picture in the same hues of darkness and of blood. Ghezo is a good king as things go, and rather particularly good for an African, for whom the world has done nothing, and who, therefore, cannot be expected to do much for the world. He has a threatening example before him. His elder brother is a prisoner, with as much to eat and more to drink than is good for him—caged up by a crowd of guards, who prevent him from doing any thing else. He was deposed, and reduced to this state, because his rule did not suit his subjects.

Ghezo, therefore, has the office of seeing men roll on the earth before him, and scrape up dust over themselves; of being deafened by vociferations of his dignity and virtue and glory and honor, by court poets and parasites, on state occasions; the office of keeping satisfied, with pay and plunder, the ferocious spirit of a blood-thirsty people; the office of looking out for some victim tribe, whom, by craft and violence, they may ruin; and the office of procuring, catching and buying some scores of human victims, whom he and his savages murder, at different set seasons, in public.

A good share of this used to be effected by means of the slave-trade. But that is gone, or nearly so, and with it may go much of the atrocity of Dahomean public life. Things are yet, however, and may long remain, in a transition state. He and his people will not suddenly lose their taste for the excitement of human suffering; and it would be a danger for which, it is probable, he has not the moral courage, or a result for which he has no real wish, to bring old national ceremonies to a sudden pause. But there are circumstances likely to act with effect in producing the change, which is a matter destined to occur at some time or other, and to be obtained when it occurs only in one mode; and the sooner the process is begun, the sooner it will end.

SKULL ORNAMENTS & BANNERS OF DAHOMEY.

As to what it is that higher principles must banish from the world, Commander Forbes, of the British Navy, in 1850, the latest visitor of that country who has given an account of it, tells us what he saw. He says: “There is something fearful in the state of subjection in which, in outward show, the kings of Dahomey hold their highest officers; yet, when the system is examined, these prostrations are merely keeping up of ancient customs. Although no man’s head in Dahomey can be considered warranted for twenty-four hours, still the great chief himself would find his tottering if one of these customs was omitted.”

They were preparing for the ceremony of watering the graves of the royal ancestors with blood; during which the king also presents some victims as a royal gift to his people. This merely means that they are knocked down in public, and their heads cut off, amidst trumpeting, and clamor, and jesting.

“With much ceremony,” we read, “two large calabashes, containing the skulls of kings,” conquered by the Dahomeans, “ornamented with copper, brass, coral, &c., were brought in and placed on the ground. Some formed the heads of walking-sticks, distaffs; while those of chiefs and war-men ornamented drums, umbrellas, surmounted standards, and decorated doorways. They were on all sides in thousands.”

“There was much to disgust the white man in the number of human skulls and jaw-bones displayed; but can the reader imagine twelve unfortunate human beings lashed hands and feet, and tied in small canoes and baskets, dressed in clean white dresses, with a high red cap, carried on the heads of fellow-men? These, and an alligator and a cat, were the gift of the monarch to the people—prisoners of war.”... “When carried round the court, they bore the gaze of their enemies without shrinking. At the foot of the throne they halted, while the Mayo presented each with a head (bunch) of cowries, extolling the munificence of the monarch, who had sent it to them to purchase a last meal, for to-morrow they must die.”

Again: “But of the fourteen now brought on the platform, we the unworthy instruments of the Divine will, succeeded in saving the lives of three. Lashed as we have described before, these sturdy men met the gaze of their persecutors, with a firmness perfectly astonishing. Not a sigh was breathed. In all my life I never saw such coolness before, so near death.... The victims were held high above the heads of their bearers, and the naked ruffians thus acknowledged the munificence of their prince.... Having called their names, the nearest one was divested of his clothes; the foot of the basket placed on the parapet, when the king gave its upper part an impetus, and the victim fell at once into the pit beneath. A fall upwards of twelve feet may have stunned him, and before sense could return, his head was cut off, and the body thrown to the mob; who, now armed with clubs and branches, brutally mutilated it and dragged it to a distant pit.” Forbes and his companion had retired to their seats away from the sight. Two sons of Da Souza, the notorious slayer, remained to look on.

THE PLATFORM OF THE AH-TOH.

The circumstance most likely to have effect in restraining these barbarities, is the value which slaves will now bear as the means of cultivating the ground, and raising exportable produce, to which alone the monarch and people must look, in the diminished state of the slave-trade, to furnish means for their expenses. Victims and slaves will also be more difficult to be procured by warfare, inasmuch as civilized people have more general access to the country, and will introduce a better policy, and more powerful defensive means among the people. Christianity also is adventuring there, and carrying its peaceful influence and nobler motives with it.

Lagos plundered recaptured slaves returning to their homes. The authorities deserved no favor. A better man—perhaps a more legitimate claimant for the royal dignity—was found, and after a severe fight, in which the British cruisers warmly participated, he was seated on the throne. A severe blow was given to the slave-trade. Affairs seemed to be going on smoothly until early in the autumn of 1853, when a revolution broke out, amidst which the king died, and the country, as far as is known, remains in confusion.

The present is an interesting period in the history of the world. Changes are rapid and irrevocable. Circumstances illustrative of the condition of our race as it has been, are disappearing rapidly. The future must trust to our philosophic observation, and faithful testimony, for its knowledge of savage life. The helplessness, and artlessness, and miserable shifts of barbarism are becoming things of the past. There is perhaps no region of the earth which is now altogether beyond the reach of civilized arts. Shells, and flints, and bows, and clubs, and bone-headed spears are everywhere giving way to more useful or more formidable implements. Improvements in dress and tools and furniture will soon be universal. The history of man as he has been, requires therefore to be written now, while the evidence illustrative of it has not altogether vanished.

The changes of the last three centuries have, to only a slight degree, influenced the African races. An inaccessible interior, and a coast bristling with slave-factories, and bloody with slaving cruelties, probably account for this. The slight progress made shows the obduracy of the degradation to be removed, and the difficulty of the first steps needed for its removal. Wherever the slave-trade or its effects penetrated, there of course peace vanished, and prosperity became impossible. This evil affected not only the coast, but spread warfare to rob the country of its inhabitants, far into the interior regions. There were tribes, however, uninfluenced by it, and some of these have gained extensive, although but temporary authority. Yet nowhere has there been any real civilization. It is singular that these people should have rested in this unalloyed barbarism for thousands of years, and that there should have been no native-born advancement, as in Mexico, or Peru, or China; and no flowing in upon its darkness of any glimmering of light from the brilliant progress and high illumination of the outside world. It has been considered worthy of note, that a few years ago one of the Veys had contrived a cumbrous alphabet to express the sounds of his language; but it is surely, to an incomparable degree, more a matter of surprise, that centuries passed away in communication with Europeans, without such an attempt having been made by any individual, of so many millions, during so many generations of men.

The older state of negro society, therefore, still continues. With the exception of civilized vices, civilized arms, and some amount of civilized luxuries, life on the African coast, or at no great distance from it, remains now much the same as the first discoverers found it.

As it was two hundred years ago, the food of the people consists of rice, maize and millet; or the Asiatic, the American and the African native grains. A few others, of comparatively little importance, might be added to these. Many fruits, as bananas, figs and pumpkins, compose part of their subsistence.

Flesh of all kinds was used abundantly before European arms began to render game scarce. Fish along the coast, and beside the rivers and interior lakes, are used, except by some tribes, who regard them as unclean. The Bushmen south of Elephants’ Bay, reject no kind of reptile. The snake’s poison arms their weapon, and its body is eaten. As the poisons used act rapidly, and do not affect the flesh of the animal, it is devoured without scruple and without danger. Throughout all the deserts, as in ancient times, the locust, or large winged grasshopper, is used as an article of food, not nutritive certainly, but capable of sustaining life. The wings and legs are pulled off, and the bodies are scorched, in holes heated as ovens, and having the hot sand hauled over them.

In Dahomey, according to Duncan, there is some improvement in agriculture, traced to the return from the Brazils of a few who had been trained as slaves in that empire. This influence, and that of ideas imported from civilized society, seem to be more prevalent in Dahomey than elsewhere. The present sovereign has mitigated the laws, diminished the transit duties, and acted with such judicious kindness towards tribes who submitted without resistance, that his neighbors, tired of war and confusion, have willingly, in some instances, preferred to come under his jurisdiction.

These circumstances, together with the treaty formed by England with the King of Dahomey, in 1852, for the suppression of the slave-trade, indicate that a new destiny is opening for the African races. It may be but rarely that a man of so much intelligence gains power; and the successor of the present king may suffer matters to decline; but still great sources of evil are removed, and the people are acquiring a taste for better practices. Human sacrifices have, to a great extent, been abolished; and the wants of cultivation will of themselves render human life of higher value. The two great states of Ashantee and Dahomey, now both open to missionary influence, are likely to run an emulative race in the career of improvement.

CHAPTER IX.

STATE OF THE COAST PRIOR TO THE FOUNDATION OF LIBERIA—NATIVE TRIBES—CUSTOMS AND POLICY—POWER OF THE FOLGIAS—KROOMEN, ETC.—CONFLICTS.

The lands chosen as the site of the American colony excited attention in olden times. “Africa would be preferable to Europe,” said the French navigator Villault in 1667, “if it were all like Cape Mount.” He launches out with delight on the beauty of the prospects, and the richness of the country. He says, “There you find oranges, almonds, melons, pumpkins, cherries and plums,” and the abundance of animals was so great that the flesh was sold “for almost nothing.” Of the Rio Junco he remarks, “The banks are adorned with trees and flowers; and the plains with oranges, citrons and palms in beautiful clumps.” At Rio Cesters he found a people rigidly honest, who had carefully preserved the effects of a deceased trader, until a vessel arrived to receive them.

Another Frenchman, Desmarchais, in the succeeding century was invited by “King Peter” to form an establishment on the large island at Cape Mesurado, but he preferred the Cape itself, on account of the advantages of its position.

The country adjoining Mesurado, although subsequently harassed and wasted by the slave-trade, had in early times a national history and policy, containing incidents which illustrate the character of savage man as displayed in such social arrangements as his dull apprehension can contrive. This will be apparent from circumstances in its history during the sixteenth century.

The country was held chiefly by divisions of a great community, known by the common name of Monoo. The Gallas and the Veys were intruders, but nearly related. The Mandi, or head of the Monoo, retained reverence and dignity, but had lost dominion.

The subordinate tribes ranged themselves in rank, according to the power they possessed, which varied with temporary circumstances. Thus the Monoo lorded it over the Folgias; the Folgias over the Quojas, and the Quojas over the Bulams and Kondos.

Their fortresses were square inclosures, surrounded by stout palisades, driven close together, having four structures somewhat in the form of bastions, through which, and under their defence, were the entrances to the place. Two streets in the interior, crossing each other in the centre, connected these entrances. They had a kind of embrasures or port-holes in these wooden walls, out of which they threw assagays or spears and arrows.

Along the eastern bank of the Junco, stretched the lands of the Kharoo Monoos, the Kroomen so well known to our cruisers of the present day. The Folgias weakened in warfare had recourse to the sorceries of a celebrated performer in that line, whose policy in the case savored very greatly of earthly wisdom. He recommended religious strife as the best mode of weakening the enemy. They therefore contrived to excite some “old school and new school” controversy with regard to the sacredness of a pond held in reverence by the Kroos.

It was a matter of Kroo orthodoxy, that into this pond the great ancestor and author of their race had descended from heaven, and there first made his appearance as a man. Hence it was the faith of their established church to make offerings to the pond in favor of the fish that dwelt there.

Now it was also an old and ever-to-be-respected law among them, that no fish should be boiled with the scales on. Amid their career of victory, the audacious and criminal fact was one day discovered, that into the sacred pond, the just object of reverence to an enlightened and religious people, there had been thrown a quantity of fish boiled in a mode which indicated contempt for every thing praiseworthy and national, inasmuch as not a scale had been scraped off previously to their being boiled.

The nation got into a ferment about the fish-scales. From arguments they went to clubs and spears. Parties accusing and parties accused defended their lives, in “just and necessary wars,” while the Folgias looked on until both were weak enough to be conquered. The victors, however, were generous. Their chief married the sister of Flonikerri, the leader of the Kroos, and left him in sovereignty over his people. Flonikerri showed his loyalty by resisting an attack on the Folgias by the Quabo of the southeast.

In the mean time the great sovereign Mendino, king of the Monoos, had died; and as negro chiefs are or ought to be immortal, and as no king can die except by sorcery, his brother Manomassa was accused as having contrived his death. He drank the sassy-wood, and survived, without satisfying the people. As the sorcerers proposed to hold a kind of court of inquiry upon the case, Manomassa, indignant at the charge, surrendered himself to the care of the “spirits of the dead,” and went away among the Gala.

There his character gained him the office of chief. But annoyed at their subsequent caprice, he threw himself upon the generosity of the Folgias, who employed Flonikerri to reinstate him in his dominion over the Gala. Flonikerri had in fact become a kind of generalissimo of the united tribes. He was afterwards employed in subduing the Veys of Cape Mount; and after various battles, reduced them to offer proof of their submission. This consisted in each swallowing some drops of blood from a great number of chickens, which were afterwards boiled; they ate the flesh, reserving the legs, which were delivered to the conqueror, to be preserved as a memorial of their fealty.

Flonikerri fell in battle, resisting a revolt of the Galas. Being hard pressed, he drew a circle round him on the ground, vowing that within it he would resist or die. Kneeling there he expired under showers of arrows.

His brother and successor, Killimanzo, extended the authority of the tribe by subduing the Quilligas along the Gallinas river. The son of the latter, Flanseer, extended their conquests to Sierra Leone, crushed some rebellions, and left a respectable domain under the sway of his son Flamburi. Then it was that the energy, skill and vices of Europeans came powerfully into action among the contentions of the natives, until they rendered war a means of revenue, by making men an article of merchandise for exportation.

The same language prevailed among all their tribes. The most cultivated dialect was that of the Folgias, who prided themselves greatly on the propriety and the elegance of their speech, and on the figurative illustrations which they threw into it. They retained their supremacy over the Quojas, notwithstanding the extended dominion of the latter. This was indicated by the investiture of the chief of the Quojas with the title of Donda, by the king, or Donda, of the Folgias. The ceremony bore the character of abasement almost universal among the negro race. The Quoja aspirant, having approached the Folgia chief in solemn state, threw himself on the ground, remaining prostrate until the Folgian had thrown some dust over him. He was then asked the name he chose to bear. His attendants repeated it aloud. The king of the Folgians pronounced it, adding the title of Donda; and the whole multitude seized and shouted it with loud acclamations. He was invested with a bow and quiver. Mutual presents concluded the ceremony.

State and dignity, of such a character as could be found among savages, were strictly enforced in these old times. Ambassadors did not enter a territory until they had received permission, and until an officer had been sent to conduct them. There were receptions, and reviews, and stately marchings, trumpetings, drummings, and singing of songs, and acclamations, and flatteries.

The attendants of the ambassador prostrated themselves. He was only required to kneel, but, having bent his head in reverence, he wheeled round to the people, and drew the string of his bow to its full bent, indicating that he became the king’s soldier and defender. Then came his oration, which was repeated, sentence by sentence, in the mouth of the king’s interpreter. The Quojas claimed the credit of best understanding the proper ceremonies of civil life. How great is the difference between this population, and the few miserable slave-hunters, who subsequently ravaged, rather than possessed, these shores!

CHAPTER X.

GENERAL VIEWS IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF COLONIES—PENAL COLONIES—VIEWS OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES IN REFERENCE TO AFRICAN COLONIES—STATE OF SLAVERY AT THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR—NEGROES WHO JOINED THE ENGLISH—DISPOSAL OF THEM BY GREAT BRITAIN—EARLY MOVEMENTS WITH RESPECT TO AFRICAN COLONIES—PLAN MATURED BY DR. FINLEY—FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY.

The views of men in founding colonies, have varied in different ages of the world. Although, however, some special inducement may have been pre-eminent at different times, yet a multiplicity of motives have generally combined in leading to such undertakings. Hannibal found the municipal cities, or Roman colonies of Italy, the obstacles to his conquest of the republic. It was with provident anticipation of such an effect that they were founded. Lima in Peru, and other places in Brazil and elsewhere, had their origin in similar aims. Differences in political views have led to the foundation of many colonies; and, superadded to these, religious considerations have had their influence in the settlement of some of the early North American colonies.

In the small republics of Greece, the seditious, or the criminal—sometimes whole classes of men, whose residence was unsuitable to the general interests—were cast adrift to go where they chose, probably making a general jail delivery for the time being.

Modern efforts of the kind are, upon the whole, more systematic. A colony sent for settlement or for subsistence, is purely so. A military colony is purely military, or, more generally, is nothing else than a garrison. A colony of criminals is restricted to the criminals. In this case a new element characterizes the modern system, for the object is not merely to remove the criminal, but to reform him. England has done much in this way. It is a great result, that in Australia there are now powerful communities, rich with the highest elements of civilization; constituted to a great extent of those who otherwise, as the children of criminals, would have been born to wretchedness and depravity, to cells and stripes and brandings and gibbets, as their inheritance.

But such experiments are not capable of indefinite repetition; space is wanting for them in the world. Nations are now called by the imperious force of circumstances, or more properly speaking, by the decree of Providence, to the nobler task of preventing rather than punishing; of raising society from the pollution of vice rather than curing or expelling it. This higher effort, which is natural to the spirit of Christianity, should have accompanied it everywhere. A nation is responsible for its inhabitants, and ought to master whatever tends to crime among them. Those whom it sends abroad should be its citizens, not its reprobates. It owes to the world, that the average amount of virtue in it accompany its transferred communities, so that the world does not suffer by the transference. This must be the case when a race unsuitably placed is, on account of that unsuitableness only, transported to a location more suitable.

A case which is exceptional in regard to common instances, will be when the higher and better motives to colonization take precedence of all others. Such an instance is that of returning the negro race to their own land. It is exceptional in this respect, that the transfer of that race to its more suitable locality is mainly an effort of philanthropic benevolence. Its motives, however, excel in degree, not in kind. The same inducements which at all times influenced colonizing measures, have had their place, with more or less force, in these schemes. In deriving support for them it has been necessary to appeal to every motive, and seek assistance by every inducement.

The increase of national prosperity, the promotion of national commerce, the relief of national difficulties, the preservation of national quiet, have all been urged on the different orders of men appealed to. It has been shown how all these circumstances would influence individual interests, while the higher Christian and philanthropic aims to be fulfilled by these efforts have not been overlooked. All this is perfectly right; and if right in us, it is also right in others. It would have been satisfactory if in the two parties, America and England, in respect to their measures towards African establishments, there had been more nobleness in their discussions, less national jealousies in all parties, less of sneering censure of national ambition, selfishness or grasping policy, while both parties were in fact making appeals to the very same principles in human nature, which foster national ambition, or selfishness, or grasping policy.

Although African colonization originated with, and has been sustained wholly by individuals, in the United States, England has regarded it in the same light with which this country has looked upon her acquisition of foreign territory.

There is, however, a high superiority in these schemes of African colonization, although it be but in degree. The best and holiest principles were put prominently forward, and men of corresponding character called forth to direct them. They sought sympathy and aid from the English African Association, and from the Bible and Missionary Societies of this land. They were truly efforts of Christianity, throwing its solid intelligence and earnest affections into action for the conquest of a continent, by returning the Africans to their home, and making this conquest a work of faith and labor of love.

The slavery imported and grafted on this country by foreign political supremacy, when the country was helpless, has been subjected to a trial never undergone by such an institution in any other part of the world. An enemy held dominion where slavery existed, and while the masters were called upon to fight for their own political independence, there was opportunity for the slave to revolt or escape if such had been his wish. Those who are not acquainted with the ties uniting the slave to his master’s household, and the interest he feels in his master’s welfare, would expect that when a hostile army was present to rescue and to defend them, the whole slave population would rise with eager fury to avenge their subjection, or with eager hope to escape from it. But the historical truth is, that very few indeed of the colored men of the United States, whether slaves or free, joined the English or Tory party in the Revolutionary War. Thus the character impressed on the institution frustrated the recorded expectation of those who forced this evil upon a reluctant people—that the position and the influence of the negro in society would forever check republican spirit and keep the country in dependence.

The small number of colored persons who did join the English produced no slight difficulty. That small number ought perhaps to have been easily amalgamated somehow or other with the vast amount of the English population. That this did not happen, and did not seem possible, is perfectly evident. Either color, or character, or position, or something else, which it is for the English people to explain, prevented this. Many of them were found in the lanes and dens of vice in London, without the prospect of their ever amalgamating with the Londoners, and therefore only combining incumbrance, nuisance, and danger by their presence there.

This condition of things, as is well known, excited the attention and sympathy of Granville Sharpe, and led to the foundation of the colony of Sierra Leone, as a refuge for them.

Great Britain found herself hampered on a subsequent occasion with the charge of a few hundreds of the Maroons, or independent free negroes of Jamaica. It was known that it would not answer to intermingle them with the slave population of that island. The public good was found imperiously to require that they should be removed elsewhere. They afterwards constituted the most trustworthy portion of the population of Sierra Leone.

Similar difficulties have pressed with a manifold weight on society in this country. Jefferson, with other distinguished statesmen, endeavored to remedy them. Marshall, Clay, Randolph, and others shared in his anxieties. A suitable location was sought after for the settlement of the free negroes in the lands of the West. The Portuguese government was afterwards sounded for the acquisition of some place in South America. But these schemes were comparatively valueless, for they wanted the main requisite,—that Africa itself should share in the undertaking.

When Christian benevolence looked abroad upon the face of the world to examine its condition and its wants, Africa was seen, dark, gloomy, and vast and hopeless, with Egyptian darkness upon it,—“darkness that might be felt,”—while Europe guarded and fought for it as a human cattle-fold, to be plundered with an extent and atrocity of rapine such as the world elsewhere had never beheld. Africa, therefore, became the object of deep interest to the Christian philanthropy of this country, and all things concurred to bring out some great enterprise for its benefit and that of the African race in America.

In 1773 slavery was not only common in New England, but the slave-trade was extensively carried on in Rhode Island and other northern states. Dr. Hopkins became convinced of the injustice of the traffic, and in conjunction with Dr. Stiles, afterwards President of Yale College, made an appeal to the public in behalf of some colored men whom he was preparing for an African mission. These men were nearly qualified for proceeding to Africa when the Revolutionary War frustrated the scheme, which, in its character, was rather missionary than colonial.