Making signs that I was a friend, or wished to be considered one, by casting away my asseguy, and placing my hands upon my head and breast, I advanced with a resolute aspect, but with a quaking heart, towards them.
By what I heard then, and learned afterwards, I had violated the sanctity of a holy place—the abode of a fetish—as this wood had for ages been dedicated to the Devil, whom these savages, like those of Benin, worship as a dreadful spirit, not to love, but to conciliate.
No one entered this wood, which was composed of giant chestnuts, palm, orange, and lime trees, all growing wild for many leagues, as the spirit of evil was alleged to harbour in its inmost recesses.
Here then, on its skirts, a mother and her infant were sometimes sacrificed with tortures too terrible for description, to propitiate this dark spirit; though in some rare instances a husband might ransom his doomed wife with a poor female slave, captured from a hostile tribe.
So sacred is this wood deemed, that if a person accidentally enters it by one path, he must force his way through it to the very end without turning or looking back—a feat none ever performed, as it teems with wild beasts, whose fangs and claws speedily dispose of the intruder. Even a foreign negro, or his wives, dare not enter it; then, what punishment was due to me, a white man, for having ventured to do so?
Dapper, a very old traveller, and a bold fellow, too, mentions that, to ridicule the faith of the people in this forest, he went shooting into it, and deliberately turned back when about half way through.
"What will the Devil think of this?" he asked the negro priests, who were scared by his audacity, and confounded by his return in safety.
"He does not trouble himself about white men," was their response; and, singular to say, our traveller was permitted to go unscathed, for savages generally admire courage and temerity.
However, the negroes into whose hands I had unfortunately fallen seemed of a different opinion from Mr. Dapper's friends; and after a noisy palaver, to which I listened with an agonizing interest, my life being in the balance, they laid violent hands upon me.
I was dragged to a tall palm-tree, which grew on the verge of the forest, with some of its fibrous roots extending among the grassy border on one side, and into the dry sand of the desert on the other.
I was placed with my back against the stem; and there they bound me hard and fast by drawing my arms round it and tying my wrists securely by the tendrils of a convolvolus—one of the climbing kind, which, when tough and green, is strong as a new inch-rope.
They then retired, mocking and grinning, and ever and anon threatening to launch their asseguys at me; thus I fully expected to be martyred like St. Sebastian, as we see him in Guido's picture at Dulwich; but they left me, and disappeared round an angle of the forest, abandoning me to my fate and my own terrible reflections.
It was midday now, and above me shone the blaze of an almost vertical sun; thus I found the shade of the drooping palm branches grateful and pleasant—a boon, a blessing.
Lest the savages might be watching me from a distance, I did not attempt to release my hands; but after nearly an hour elapsed, fearing that strength might fail me from the cramped manner in which my arms were bound backward round the tree, I strove to rend the green withes which fettered me to it.
Vain task!
Strain them as I might, the tough and unyielding tendrils of the convolvoli only seemed to tighten, and to cut me as I tore, wrenched, and struggled, without success.
The horror of being left thus defenceless at the mercy of the wild animals with which the forest teemed was so great, that I forgot alike the pangs of hunger and those of thirst, which are greater still; and again and again strove frantically for freedom, until, with the futility of each successive effort, the conviction forced itself upon me, that without human assistance I could never be released, but might perish of starvation, or be devoured alive.
Human assistance! who, then, would be disposed to aid me? And, if so, who would come in time?
And so the hot day passed breathlessly, slowly, and terribly on!
As the burning sun revolved towards the West, the lengthening shadows of the wood went round in the reverse direction, until the level sunbeams cast them far across the arid desert I had traversed so swiftly yesterday; and as the light of evening sank, the hues of that white glistening waste changed to yellow, then to brown, and then to amber.
My arms ached till they seemed in process of being rent from my shoulders: so, panting, hot, breathless, and half dead with thirst, I reclined against that abhorred tree, from which I could in no way free myself.
As evening deepened, the hum of insect life lessened, and the bright-plumed birds of the wilderness were seeking their nests in the foliage above me; but on me their beauty was lost. Even the cock of the Libyan forest, with his purple breast, his crimson and green pinions, was unheeded, as he picked up a few grains of millet at my feet, and passed to his mate in the orange tree.
A raven or two, soaring through the blue immensity of the sky, suggested dreadful thoughts of what I might be on the morrow.
Then little snakes came from amid the long grass to writhe and wriggle on the sand, which was yet warm with the sunshine of the past day; and they made me think of the dreadful cobra-capello, with his flamelike tongue, charged with poison and death—the hooded serpent, which, when in fury, has been known to rear its horrid front, and spring at a man on horseback; and then of the berg-adder, which I feared still more, because it is so difficult to discover, and which I had no means of avoiding if it approached me.
My past reading had given me, moreover, a somewhat exaggerated idea of the number of wild animals in Africa. At Ascension, I had seen a narrative of a Voyage à l'Isle de France, by a person who styled himself an Officier du Roi, and who stated that, in the forests of Africa, "there were to be found whole armies of lions."
Later travellers have ridiculed this idea, but be that as it may, the distant roaring of a lion now added to the accumulating dangers which surrounded me, and filled my soul with emotions of horror so great that I could not summon even a thought of prayer, and memory refused to supply me with the most hackneyed ejaculation of piety.
Bound and helpless, without means of defence or flight, I now heard this terrible animal approaching me, crushing the shrubs and branches in his native forest as he came.
On hearing this sound, so fraught with danger, a zebra and several antelopes bounded out of the wood and paused to listen. Again that prolonged cry rang upon the still air. The zebra cowered and shuddered, and after crouching for a moment, sprang away into the desert of sand, followed by the fleet little antelopes (which were of the kind called Guinea Deer, having legs no thicker than a tobacco-pipe), and they were all soon out of sight.
The roar was singular in sound. Hoarse and inarticulate, it swelled upon the air like a prolonged O, that seemed to come from and pass to a vast distance. It never became loud or shrill, but the idea it suggested of the animal itself, made it seem to pierce the very soul; and all the tales I had read or heard of the lion, and all the terrors I had conjured up as being embodied in his tremendous person, came upon me like a flood.
There are some who aver that if he has once tasted human flesh he will for ever disdain any other.
With great bewilderment of mind—like one in a dream that is full of nightmare—I beheld a great and dark-skinned lion, with an enormous dusky mane, run out of the wood about a hundred yards off, and, after looking about, he came straight towards me, for by some strange instinct he became sensible of my vicinity in a moment. In his mouth he bore a zebra (about the size of a Shetland pony), which he grasped by its crushed back, and the legs of which were trailing on the ground as he bore it along, with all the air and all the ease of a cat carrying off a large rat.
On beholding me he dropped his prey, which was quite dead, and after uttering another hoarse roar, continued to approach, with his nose close to the ground, while switching his tufted tail and shaking his shaggy mane, preparatory, as I imagined, to making a spring upon me; then I closed my eyes, and with a heart that died within me, resigned myself to my fate.
Onward he came, step by step, for I could hear his footfalls on the ground!
Onward yet, and now every pulse seemed to stand still!
Then a warm and fetid breath played upon my face, I felt his whiskers touch my breast, and there was a strange snuffing sound in my tingling ears.
Opening my eyes, I beheld close to mine the tremendous visage of the lion, the enormous upper lip, in form so suggestive of cruelty and rapacity, and all studded with wiry hairs, bristling out fiercely on either side; the low flat forehead and impending brows; the wild orbs that seemed to glare from amid the masses of his tangled mane; the open jaws and sharp teeth, reeking and steaming with the warm blood of the zebra he had just slain!
After deliberately snuffing at me in this manner for a second or so—a time which seemed an eternity, so much agony of thought and tension of the heart were compressed within it, he quietly turned about, took his dead zebra, as if he deemed it the most preferable supper of the two, trotted into the wood and disappeared.
The agonies of a lifetime seemed concentrated into that minute!
All I had endured now proved too much for me. A sudden insensibility sank like a cloud over all my senses, and a sleep—the sleep of utter prostration of mind and body, fell upon me. Thus, the noon of the next day was far advanced before I became again conscious, or aware of my miserable existence.
Released from the tree, but still benumbed and sore after being so long bound to it, I was now stretched upon the grass, under the shadow of its great fan-like branches. Many persons were moving about me, and the hum of their voices filled my ear.
Raising myself slowly and heavily upon my hands, I saw around me hundreds of negroes, and close to mine was the ugly visage of—Amoo.
"Oh," thought I, bitterly; "this is too much! A prisoner again, and after all the dangers I have dared—the friends I have seen perish—the miseries I have undergone! Will fate never weary of persecuting me?"
But Amoo was not such a wicked fellow after all.
Producing his gourd bottle of palm wine, he mixed it with cool water from a shaded spring, and forced me to imbibe a long draught, after which I sat up and looked about me more collectedly.
I was in the midst of a species of negro bivouac, consisting of many hundreds of men and women, with camels and dromedaries laden with various stuffs and rudely fashioned weapons and utensils, made up in bales with grass matting and cordage.
They were cooking at several fires, and in various modes, the flesh of an elephant which they had snared, as Amoo informed me, in a pit on the other side of the forest on the preceding day, and the meat of which is esteemed in these latitudes as a veritable dainty—a right royal luxury. He pressed me to eat a slice or so, but in my weak state, and the fever of my spirit, the odour and the aspect of it were more than enough for me, so a mouthful or two of boiled yam and palm wine sufficed.
The negroes were all well armed with asseguys, swords, bows, muskets, and targets, as if proceeding on a hostile expedition. Among them were many who were better clad and more civilized in aspect than the painted savages who dwell by the Snake River, and these, Amoo informed me, were subjects of the King of Benin.
After relating how his companions had found me bound to the tree, senseless or asleep, he inquired how it came to pass I was there.
"I fled to escape your wife," said I, looking round fearfully.
"Yah, yah," said he, laughing; "I was sorry for the loss of my white slave, but am glad you escaped her knife; for she wished much to ornament her big canoe, so she got the head of another white man."
"Another—who—which?"
"Amoo does not know; he tried to steal a canoe and escape to the Pongo Islands, but was retaken, and so my wife got his head for her canoe. She boiled it in a stone pipkin, with gums and herbs, stuck fish-bones in its nose and ears, and now it will last for many, many suns and moons, without decay."
(Who was this other unfortunate that had perished so miserably? He might be my friend Hartly—if indeed it was not he who was so cruelly destroyed in the basket of thorns.)
"Never mind who it was," said Amoo, divining my thoughts, "since you are found again."
"To be your prisoner?" I sighed.
Amoo grinned, leered cunningly, and shook his woolly head.
"What then?"
"To be reserved for something better than being my slave."
"Better!" I reiterated, with perplexity; "how—where?"
"Yah, yah—you will learn in good time."
"When?" I exclaimed, with impatience.
"On our reaching the capital of Benin."
"You are going there with all these people?"
"Yah."
"For what purpose—to fight?"
"No."
"What then?"
"To bury Zabadie, the king, who is dead."
I was somewhat comforted by this, as everything added to the chances of escape; for I knew that European vessels frequently anchored in the Bight of Benin, and I associated ideas of greater civilization with that quarter of Africa, though it bordered on Dahomey—that barbarous land of blood and terror.
It was evident that Amoo knew nothing about my encounter in the wood with the King, his brother, or the manner in which I had borrowed the royal dromedary; for he informed me, in the course of our obscure and somewhat pantomimic conversation, that on his return he would probably find himself King of the Snake River, as his brother was not expected to live.
I inquired why.
"As he was asleep under a tree, a great baboon let a big stone fall upon his head, and nearly killed him," replied Amoo, with perfect unconcern, and I cannot plead guilty to feeling the smallest compunction in the matter.
This species of caravan was proceeding from the territory of Gabon, whose king is a vassal of the monarch of Benin, with a tribute of female slaves, baskets, gourd vessels, panther skins, elephants' teeth, and gold dust, to assist at the funeral of the late royal defunct, or to lay at the feet of his successor; and I was pleased to find that we were to proceed as nearly as possible along the coast.
I resolved to take the first opportunity of securing arms—a musket and knife if possible—of leaving the cavalcade, and concealing myself in a wood near the sea-shore, there to await a ship; but the hope was formed in vain, for Amoo, who frequently spoke of the "great future in store for me at Benin," never lost sight of me for an instant, either by night or by day, when we halted.
When we did so, we warily lighted a circle of large fires to scare wild animals from our bivouac. and thus could sleep in security.
The whole of the coast there is broken by innumerable river estuaries, the banks of which are covered by bright green reeds, and broad-leaved weeds and canes of mighty growth. Thus our progress was slow, as we had frequently to embark in canoes on those frowsy waters, whose miasma is so pestilential by night, and which are ever rendered dangerous by the alligators and hippopotami that lurk in the oozy holes along their banks.
At a place where we were about to cross, the black scouts, who formed a species of advanced guard, returned in haste and excitement to state that one of the last-named animals (one of great size, too) was asleep on the bank.
On hearing this the caravan halted, and Amoo, being a brave and hardy warrior, and moreover the brother of a king, claimed the privilege of assailing it. Armed with a spear made specially for the purpose, he advanced to the enterprise, accompanied only by one companion and by me, to whom he relinquished for a time his gaily painted bow and quiver of poisoned arrows.
I had heard so much of those fierce and unwieldy monsters, that I followed him with considerable interest and curiosity as we shouldered and pushed a passage through a dense and leafy jungle of gigantic weeds, prickly yams, serrated grass, and reeds of enormous height, which flourished amid the deep quagmire that bordered the broad bosom of this majestic but nameless river, whose waters are now rolling, as they have rolled for ages, into the Gulf of Guinea.
On forcing our way through a wall of reeds, we suddenly came upon the hippopotamus, which was lying on his left side, asleep in the sunshine, and stretched at full length upon a piece of greensward, where, probably, he had been grazing overnight.
The aspect of this mis-shapen monster, which was about fourteen feet long—his singular form, a great round body with short elephantine legs, a broad, square head and stunted tail—was as repulsive as the size of his great cavernous mouth with its terrible incisors was appalling.
He slept soundly, however, so Amoo, gliding stealthily as a serpent, approached until within seven feet of where he lay, snoring heavily, and basking in the hot and breathless sunshine.
With a dexterity which my poor old friend Hans Peterkin would have appreciated highly, Amoo, with a line, attached to his spear a light wooden float which serves to show where the animal lurks when he takes the water after being struck; then, while the attending warrior stood near to hand a second lance, Amoo raised his sinewy form on tiptoe, poised his barbed weapon, and hurled it, whizzing, with singular force and dexterity, full at the sleeping animal.
Deep through the thick, dark hide sunk the pointed spear, until its iron head was completely buried. At the moment it left his hand, Amoo, an agile and practised huntsman, sprang backward several paces; but not so his unfortunate companion, on whom the awakened monster leaped with the weight of an elephant united to the fury of a panther, and in an instant crushed him to death in his enormous jaws, doubling up the body and grinding ribs and legs together till they were churned into a mass of blood.
Then plunging into the river, he disappeared, leaving the water covered with froth and bloody ripples, that ran in circles to either shore; but still the little buoy attached to the spear or harpoon floated and bobbed up and down to indicate where he lay writhing among the weeds and beds of bright blue coral far down below—for the coral is blue there.
Amoo's shrill cries brought several negroes to his assistance; and these, enraged by the sudden death of their friend, began to haul sturdily on the line, which was a good English rope, obtained from some passing ship by theft or barter; this irritated the wounded animal, so he came surging, bleeding, and frothing to the surface again, when a dozen spears, whizzing through the air, were launched by unerring hands, and he was soon slain, and amid exulting yells, whooping, and beating of tum-tums, was hauled close in shore among the reeds, and there, as he was too bulky to be pulled entirely out of the water, was cut up in large pieces and placed in baskets on the backs of the camels, dromedaries, and slaves.
Amoo declared this prey was too full-grown, and consequently too fat for eating; but added, that his "skin would make excellent whips."
This was the fifth he had slain—thus he equalled Commodus who slew five in the amphitheatre.
The country through which we travelled was low, flat, and thickly wooded; thus we seldom saw the sea; yet, when glimpses of its bright blue waters, stretching to the horizon far away, came before us at times through the groves of orange, lime, and palm trees, or through valleys where the white tufts of the cotton buds flecked the greenness of the luxuriant scenery, how anxiously, how affectionately I gazed upon it, for it was the high road to my home—the way to freedom and dear old England!
After travelling many days, until I was almost sinking with fatigue, by the intense heat of the atmosphere and the number of things I was compelled (as a slave) to carry, we came at last in sight of the great city of Benin, which stretches far along the right bank of the river Formosa.
I hailed it with emotions of undisguised joy, for Amoo had been daily recurring to the liberty and honours that were in store for me there.
I resolved while life remained to persevere to the last in attempting an escape.
"'I shall never succeed,' is often the parent of failure" (to quote Isaac Taylor when writing on character). "'I will not try any more,' ensures disappointment. 'It is all chance, and I am not in luck,' most commonly leads to disgrace."
Calling his words to memory, I resolved to trust to none of these fatal phrases, for I had passed through too many perils not to hope that a few more might be surmounted.
An old writer says, "The King of Benin has men in pay to furnish travellers with water, and these keep great pots full of that which is fresh and clear at convenient distances, with a shell to drink it out of; but no person must take a drop without paying for it; and if the waterman is absent, they drink, leave the money, and pursue their way."
It may have been so when old Dapper wrote or romanced, but not a drop of water found we on the weary track to quench our burning thirst, save in stagnant tarns by the wayside.
It was towards the close of a day when we had been nearly choked by the sulphurous heat which filled the air after a violent thunderstorm, that we approached the city of Benin, and saw its long lines of huts, or wigwams, each one story high, covering for many miles the right bank of the Formosa, one of the greatest estuaries which disgorge their waters into the Bight of Benin.
Groves of beautiful wood, orange, lime trees, cotton and pepper bushes, spread along the banks of the river, and many floating islets, covered with flowers and unknown fruit trees, are constantly borne past by its waters, from the unexplored lands through which they flow.
The city and its walls too were unlike aught I had ever seen before; yet their extent was great, and the dusky hordes that peopled them are probably unnumbered and unknown.
We were admitted through a wooden gate in the ramparts, which were composed of the trunks of trees pegged together, as palisades are in America, but loopholed for arrows or musketry; and the guard at this gate, as at all the others, was composed entirely of women armed with bows, lances, and old firelocks, for, like his royal brother of Dahomey, the sovereign of Benin has somewhere about four thousand wives, whom he has armed and formed into troops, and who—when off duty—make crocks, pots, and pipkins of clay, from the sale of which he derives his principal revenue.
They were all stout and handsome negresses, attired in a species of petticoat which reached below the knee, with a vest to cover the breast; their hair was dyed into alternate red and white locks, and they had great rings of polished metal on their otherwise bare arms.
Through this guarded gate our long cavalcade of laden camels, dromedaries, negroes, and slaves, passed down a populous street of great width, and nearly three miles in length. The houses, or huts, on either side, were alike singular in aspect and construction, being built of red clay, and having behind or around them spacious gardens and shady groves of lime and orange trees. Vast crowds of male and female blacks followed us, but in solemn silence, as the cavalcade bore a double tribute to the dead king and his successor, towards whose royal palace—if the odd collection of fantastic buildings could so be called—we now proceeded.
We passed through a kind of square, which Amoo described to me as the market-place; and there the king's female guards were exposing for sale great quantities of their clay pots and pipkins, gourd bottles, calibash basons, wooden spoons and ladles of all sorts and sizes, at their own prices; for these industrious Amazons enjoyed the entire monopoly of this branch of trade; and as a hint that none might interfere with them, there hung by iron hooks upon a gibbet the headless bodies of four men, in a frightful state of decay, with turkey buzzards feeding on the fragments that dropped from them, as they sweltered in the burning sunshine.
In the centre of this market-place rose a pyramid some twenty feet high, formed entirely of human skulls, bleached white as snow by the alternate rain and sun—a ghastly and terrible trophy of barbarism and cruelty, which reminded me of stories I had read of old Mexico, where similar monuments adorned the cities of the Incas; or of the tower formed of the skulls of slaughtered Christians, now standing in the Mohammedan isle of Gerba.
Fascinated by this revolting spectacle, I passed on with the dusky multitude; and Amoo informed me (while all prostrated their ugly faces in the dust) that we stood at the gate of the king's palace!
It was a vast collection of rambling wooden houses, which formed the dwellings of the sovereign, his wives, fiadoors, or officials, stables for his horses and dromedaries, dens for slaves or prisoners (a commodity with which he seldom troubled himself), magazines for stores and plunder. These edifices extended for nearly a mile before us; and on all those quaint buildings, which were barbarously adorned with the bones and horns of animals, a grinning human skull was the chief ornament.
Through a barrier manned by a motley multitude of female guards, many of whom were armed with bayonets and old brass-butted Tower muskets, which may have done service under Moore and Wellington, we were conducted into a court surrounded by copper figures, so monstrous in aspect and conception, that the eye laboured in vain to discover whether they were meant to represent men, beasts, or birds.
The crowd who followed were all well armed with spears, bows and arrows, which, as Amoo informed me, were duly poisoned by the fetishers, or priests. Many of the fiadoors wore gay dresses of Dutch scarlet cloth, caps edged with civet fur, and necklaces of jasper and fine coral, or rings of yellow copper, bracelets of lions' teeth, and bucklers of rhinoceros hide.
Round this court were wooden pillars, curiously carved and painted, and, in some instances, covered with plates of engraved copper—the hieroglyphical records of battles, victories, and massacres—the edifices were roofed with palm canes, and had many fantastic pinnacles, surmounted by human skulls, or birds dried and prepared, with their pinions outspread.
In the centre of the court, about twenty negroes, captured from some hostile tribe, were digging a deep hole, like a vast grave, with wooden shovels; and they grinned at us malevolently as we passed them.
Amoo now told me "that the time was come to which he had so often referred, when a great honour would be conferred on me, and when we must part."
I knew not what all this meant, but bewildered by the scenes through which I had passed, the strange places in which I found myself, wearied by the toil of our journey, choked by dust and heat almost to fainting, I resigned myself to the custody of the negress guard, and left Amoo, whom hitherto I had considered a species of protector. Perceiving the dejected state I was in, he gave me a draught from his gourd bottle; and as I was thrust into my prison, and the door of it closed upon me, I saw for the last time save once, the dark visage of this friendly savage, who never forgot that I had rescued his child from the baboon.
The wooden door was secured upon me; the hum of guttural voices died away as the cavalcade passed on to some other portion of this vast and rambling habitation of barbarous royalty; then I was left to my own reflections, and partly in the dark; at least, there was just sufficient light to enable me to see a pile of straw, or dried river grass, on which I threw myself in weariness, if not in despair, as I knew not what new misfortune fate had in store for me.
Sleep, oblivion, I courted in vain. I was now, though exhausted, in too high a state of nervous excitement for sleep; and as my eyes became accustomed to the dim twilight of my prison, I could perceive the chamber to be fashioned of the trunks of trees, squared, smoothed, and pegged together, and then painted with barbarous figures. Above the door by which I had entered were three human skulls, placed upon the hoofs of hippopotami, as brackets.
A sound as of something rustling in a distant corner attracted my attention. I approached, and saw upon a pile of straw and dry leaves a white man extended at full length, and almost destitute of clothing.
I drew nearer softly, for I knew not whether this new companion in misfortune might be alive or dead.
Then imagine what were my emotions on discovering him to be my friend, sunk in a profound slumber—my old friend, Robert Hartly, captain of the fated Leda.
The pallor of his countenance, his wasted form, and sunken features shocked me, for I was quite unaware or heedless that he would find an equal ravage in my own appearance. His beard and hair grew in matted masses about his sunburnt face, and his once stout and manly hands were thin and wan as those of a consumptive girl.
I shook his shoulder; he awoke, and turned listlessly to me at first; then with a strange cry of mingled joy and grief, he exclaimed—
"Jack!"
"Bob—Bob Hartly!"
Such was all we could utter for some seconds as each clasped and shook the hands of the other.
"Oh, Jack Manly," he exclaimed, in a broken voice, "I would rather see you in your grave than in this place with me!"
"How—why—what do you mean?"
"My poor lad, you know not for what we are reserved."
"Not—not to be killed and eaten?" said I, in a low voice of dismay.
"Oh, worse than that. Do you not know?"
"No."
"My poor friend—my poor friend!"
"What on earth can be worse than that? Amoo told me——"
"Who is Amoo?"
"A chief, the brother of the King of the Rio Serpientes."
"The savage brother of a savage! And he told you——"
"That I was reserved for the greatest honour?"
"Honours indeed!" reiterated Hartly, with a bitter laugh.
"Yes."
"Did he add, you should have liberty to enjoy your honours?"
"No."
"Air—breath—sunshine—light—life?"
"No!"
"I thought not, for these accursed savages are as subtle and severe as they are cruel and sanguinary."
"What do you mean, Hartly?"
"That we are reserved for burial alive."
"Alive!"
"Yes—with their king who is just dead. It is the custom here to celebrate the obsequies of royal personages—of kings especially—in a frantic and barbarous manner. Oh, Jack! after all we have seen and suffered together, is it not cruel of fate to persecute and finish us thus? And is it not strange that in this age of a civilized world such things can be?"
"I will fight to the last!" I exclaimed, furiously.
"We have not a single weapon."
"But these female guards have plenty."
"The weakest among them is stronger than both of us put together now," said he, despondingly.
"We must not perish thus, Hartly—we shall escape!" said I, emphatically.
"But how?"
"Time will show—we were nearly as desperately circumstanced when foul of the iceberg, or beset in the field ice."
"We have still a few days for deliberation; but meantime, tell me how you came here."
"I was brought to Benin by Amoo, who saved me from dying of hunger, or by the teeth and claws of wild animals in the Devil's wood, where some savages found me concealed, and bound me hand and foot by withes to a tree."
"Tell me all about this, Jack."
I related briefly all that had occurred to me since we had been separated at the cliff above the Gabon, where three of our hapless party perished; the destruction of poor Captain Baylis and his wife; and how I feared that he, Hartly, was the seaman who had been tortured in the basket of thorns; of my slavery with Amoo, and his squaw's felonious intentions with regard to my head; of my flight and recapture—to all of which he listened with varying expressions of anger and honest grief, for the loss of so many brave English seamen.
"And now, Bob," added I, "for your own story."
"I have little to relate that is not similar to what you have told me. On that fatal day when our boat's crew were captured, and we were separated, I was given by the King to a fetisher, or priest, a hideous old fellow who was covered with tattooing, and wore a copper ring in each of his ears, and had the dorsal fin of a shark through his nose, in sprit-sail-yard fashion.
"He employed me as his 'slavey,' in making and pointing arrows for the warriors, as the manufacture of that commodity is a perquisite, or portion of the priestly trade in Gabon, for the tips of the arrows are poisoned by a combination of herbs, of which these fetishers alone possess, or pretend to possess, the knowledge, and with true priestcraft take especial good care to keep the secret among themselves. If the monstrous negro race hereabout have any religion, it consists of an adoration of the Devil, to whom they never tire of sacrificing wild animals, and occasionally each other—which is a sacrifice of much less consequence."
"Have they no belief in a Supreme Being?"
"They know that some power superior to themselves created the skies and the earth; but because He is not an evil, but a good spirit, they deem it better policy to appease the Devil, and so they work in his service with all their might; and from all we have seen, they seem to have the gift of doing so to the utmost. My old master, the fetisher, professed to be on very intimate terms with Whirlwind Tom, and by his aid could always foretell what was to happen."
"How?"
"He had an old pipkin perforated by three holes, through which he alleged the Devil spoke to him in whispers. He was a vicious old wretch, and on one occasion bit me, which was no joke, as his teeth were all filed, till they were sharp as those of a tiger cat.
"When not employed in selecting and cutting reeds for arrows, or feathering, or pointing and poisoning them, this fetisher made me fish for him in a tributary of the Snake Elver, on the bank of which he lived in a wigwam, which stood amid a grove of mimosa trees; and it resembled a huge punch-bowl or beehive, as it was built entirely of reeds and turf, plastered over with mud, which the sunshine had burned as white as Kentish chalk.
"There he led me a dog's life, for he was an ill-tempered old savage, who hourly reviled, kicked, beat, and spat upon me, and as my beard grew, he was wont to snatch and tear it, a proceeding, you must allow, very trying to one's temper.
"I perceived that we dwelt in a secluded place; that, save a warrior who came from time to time for a bundle of arrows, no one ever approached us, so I resolved to escape. In my fur socks, and a species of cummerbund which my master permitted me to wear, I secreted a good stock of fishing apparatus, and selected a strong javelin with an iron point, well steeped in those precious poisonous stuffs which he was wont to brew in a pipkin.
"On the day I had finally made up my mind to slip my cable and be off, we were cutting reeds for arrow-shafts on the summit of a rock above the Gabon River. It was a lovely place, covered with feathery fern, bright scarlet geraniums, and flowering reeds, but I thought it looked very like the place where I had last seen you, and where our three shipmates perished in so barbarous a manner. My heart became filled with wild and dark thoughts, and I was neglecting my work, when suddenly my beard was grasped by the old tattooed fetisher, who squirted a whole quid of some stuff full in my face, while raining a shower of blows upon my bare back with a sjambok, or supple-jack, of rhinoceros hide, which he always carried for my especial benefit.
"Flesh and blood could stand this no longer.
"We were close to the brink of the rock which overhung the stream that rolled about a hundred feet below, so I gave his sooty reverence a vigorous kick which shot him over like a crow, and souse he went through the air, with arms outspread.
"Whether he swam, sank, or fed some hungry crocodile, I know not, as I fled into the adjacent forest, and after lurking there long—sleeping at night in the trees, as many a time I had done on the swinging topsail-yard—I began, like you, to make for the coast to the westward, in the hope of seeing a ship venture into the Bight, or bearing toward the Pongos for fresh water.
"For many days and nights I wandered through forests of oak, cypress, myrtle, and mimosa trees, enduring constantly the terror of being devoured by wild animals, or falling again among savages who might force me to render a severe account of the blessed fetisher I had kicked into the Gabon, till at last I found myself in a stately wood of sea-pines and then I saw the ocean—the brave old ocean, Jack!—the broad turnpike that could lead us home—the same ocean whose waves swept up by the Nore and Greenwich Reach, to mingle their waters with the Thames—and I laughed with joy, though its bosom was glistening under the vertical sun that scorches the coast of Guinea.
"All the memories of home and Old England swelled up within me as I gazed upon the girdle of her shores. The sea! that
"——glorious mirror where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime!"
"When night fell, I came out of the lonely forest to gaze upon the moonlit sea—not that the forest was very lonely, after all, as there seemed to be at least fifty thousand baboons, monkeys, and squirrels, which jabbered and leaped as if they had all gone mad, the whole night, from tree to tree, and more than once the roar of a lion came hollowly from a distance, under the lower branches of the pines.
"I sat upon a piece of detached rock, and, to seek for food, dropped my fishing-line into the water. There I soon caught a fish, on which I breakfasted next day, after spreading it, split open, on the rocks, where it was half cooked by the burning sun. As for salt, there was plenty of that to be found among the crevices, where the heat had burned up the spray of the sea.
"For three nights I fished there with success and safety. On the third, I found at my line a fish of strange aspect, and, sailor-like, had some doubts about breakfasting on it, but hunger soon ends all niceties. When morning came, I sought a secluded part of the wood, and thought of lighting a little fire by rubbing dried branches together that I might broil my fish.
"Now, unless I could produce ocular proof of what I am about to say, you would laugh at me for telling you a forecastle yarn, but the proof shall not be wanting.
"While opening and cleaning the fish at a spring, previous to broiling it (an almost epicurean process to me), I found in its entrails—what? MY RING—the ring given me by old Mother Jensdochter, in Iceland, and which, as you remember, I lost a few days after we left Sermersoak, when lending a hand to haul the main-tack on board the Leda."
"Your ring!" I exclaimed; "this is like a bit of a fairy tale."
"My ring," he continued; "and here it is, hid among my hair to conceal it from these greedy negroes, who would at once deprive me of it, and keep it as an ornament or amulet."
"This is most singular!"
"Singular indeed, but on beholding it a new glow of hope filled my breast. I resolved to persevere in my efforts to escape, and so became too bold, for, venturing upon the open beach next day, I was seen by some savages belonging to the King of Biafra, who pursued and soon made me their prisoner. The rest of my story is nearly the same as your own, as my captors were with a caravan on their way to Benin, to attend the funeral of King Zabadie.
"I was severely treated by them. Under a burning and vertical sun, they employed me constantly in loading and unloading their dromedaries, or in pulling up esculent roots for them, and this was a serious task even to a hard-handed sailor, as these roots lay among thorny leaves and serrated grass, the blades of which were like newly-sharpened saws.
"In the desert, the sand was so hot that it baked or roasted the eggs I stole or found at times, and was fain to eat in secret. When my work was over, I was always malevolently treated by the women, and more especially by those little black imps, the children of the caravan. Their chief occupation was spitting at me, reviling and pelting me with stones, bones, rotten gourds, and every missile that came to hand.
"The women had a particular animosity to my beard, and the men hereabouts, like other darkies, not being troubled with much of that commodity, joined them in the general desire for having it uprooted, but I contrived to weather them by singeing it off.
"Every way I endured great misery. I was not even permitted to drink of spring water, save from a calabash, which some of their dogs had used; and to tell the truth, I preferred to drink after the poor doggies rather than after their beastly masters.
"Well, it would seem that His High Mightiness, the King of Biafra, is a vassal of that more illustrious nigger the King of Benin; so, five days ago, I was sent here, with many other miserable wretches, to be—to be——"
"What?"
"Immolated on the grave of the late king, or buried within it."
"Is such the custom?" I asked, with indescribable dismay.
"Benin borders on the kingdom of Dahomey, and all the world knows how the people there celebrate the obsequies of their kings."
"How?"
"Frequently by the massacre of thousands."
"Hartly! Hartly—we seem to go from bad to worse!"
"I have been in the Pongo Isles, along the coast of Guinea, and in the Bight of Benin before, and know all about the fiendish ways of their inhabitants. Jack, did you observe a great hole in the courtyard without?"
"Yes; and I can hear the shovels of the workers among the earth even now."
"When a king dies here, his body is laid in a kind of great hall, which, like that at Dahomey, has a ceiling ornamented by the jawbones of his enemies. There the very sleeping chambers of royalty are paved with human skulls, and have cornices entirely composed of them! Zabadie, the King of Benin, is just dead, and his son proposes to inter him with unusual splendour."
"In that hole?"
"Yes."
"But what is all this to us?"
"Oh," groaned Hartly, "do you not understand—have I not told you? When a king dies here, a great grave is dug somewhere near the palace, and it must be hollowed so deep, that the diggers are drowned by the water which bursts in upon them, and there they lie, after concluding their work. In this great hole the fiadoors place the royal corpse, dressed in all its barbaric finery, with a lance, sword, bow and arrows. With the dead king are placed all his favourites and servants, who are supposed to follow him to the other world, and serve him there; and so proud are they of this distinction, that it occasions the most violent disputes as to who shall have the honour of entombment, so blind and idolatrous is the veneration of these creatures for their dingy monarchs. When the last man has descended into the hole, an immense stone is placed over it; this is removed a few days after, and one of the great fiadoors inquires what are the tidings from beneath, adding,—
"'Who has gone to serve the king?'
"Then the poor wretches who are expiring below reply according to circumstances.
"Day after day the stone is removed, and the same questions are asked, until all in that horrid pit have 'gone to serve the king,' and are dead of starvation and the noxious miasma of the vault. When no voice responds to the inquiry of the fiadoor, the great stone is securely built over, a mighty fire is made upon it, a great festival is held, and the flesh of an elephant is roasted and given to the multitude."
"And we—we——"
"Are to be placed there among the slaves of the dead Zabadie."
I remained silent, oppressed by the horror of what was before us; but Hartly spoke again:—
"When a year has passed and gone, these wretches, in honour of their dead king and his dead followers, make a dreadful sacrifice of men and animals, till about five hundred are destroyed. Most of the human victims are malefactors, or slaves taken in war. If enough of either are not to be had, the king sends his female guards into the streets at night to decoy and seize men till the number is made up."
This was a cheerful account of the state of society in the realm of Benin, and it afforded ample food for thrilling reflection and fruitless surmises.
Yams, bananas, plantains, even boiled potatoes, and pipkins of pure spring water were liberally provided for us by our black female guardians, six of whom appeared once daily with our food and then retired, securing us with great bars of wood fastened outside in some fashion known only to themselves.
These Amazons were all well armed, and some were richly clad in braided vests and petticoats of Dutch scarlet cloth. Among them were several veteran female warriors, whose skins, by the process of time under a tropical sun, had become spotted yellow and brown, like the hides of the leopard and panther.
Light was admitted to our prison by a small square hole cut through one of the trees which formed the wall, and from thence, when each supported the other on his shoulders, we could see by turns the progress of the diggers of the royal grave in the courtyard, and to judge by the quantity of earth and stones thrown up, the depth must have been immense; and it seemed as if King Zabadie was going to the other world accompanied by all his wives, slaves, dromedaries, and diabolical courtiers to boot.
We knew not when this dreadful interment and immolation were to take place. When day dawned on us, we knew not if we should be permitted to see it close; when it closed, we knew not if we should ever behold another dawn.
So the wretched hours passed slowly, wearily on; and the close of the third day found us still captives, and still unresolved on any expedient to dree ourselves.
Sailor-like, Hartly was fertile in schemes and resources; but the former were no sooner proposed than they were abandoned as impracticable.
One time he suggested that we should endeavour to procure a light by friction, set fire to the old wooden den in which we were confined, and then seek an escape amid the consequent confusion; at another, he proposed that we should close with our guards, wrest away a musket, kill one or two of them, and fight our way off; but how could we attack women?
"If once free of the palace, the town, and its suburbs——" resumed he.
"Free! how can we remain free, Hartly, in a land where our colour, which there is no disguising, renders us constantly liable to recognition, to attack, and recapture?"
"True; but if we could only reach the coast, after having so dearly learned circumspection, we might lurk in the woods."
"Without arms?"
"We have done so before. Then we might steal a canoe, or fashion one, and put to sea."
"But the tools and the skins?"
"We could steal both, as these fellows won't lend."
"Escape from this is necessary first: and in the pilfering visits you suggest, we should certainly be retaken, together or singly; and then how miserable would be the reflections of the survivor."
"Tut, Jack! unless we venture we shall never win."
"Ah, Hartly," said I, "at last I have lost all hope!"
"Do not say so; we are both too young to despair," was the sturdy response of the English sailor.
We thought of the old stereotyped modes of escape—by ropes or ladders manufactured from shirts and trowsers, and by ample melodramatic mantles; but such were impossible to us, who were nearly as nude as when we came into the world; by drugging our guards or sentinels; by bribing, coaxing, or assassinating them; but these, and all the thousand other modes by which heroic and romantic gentlemen, when in trouble or durance, effect escapes in novels and plays, were useless or impracticable there.
Hartly, indeed, proposed to make love to one or two ladies of the royal guard, and by gaining their confidence, to effect the appropriation of their muskets and ammunition. But those dingy Amazons seemed of a very unapproachable nature; and moreover, were so thickly smeared with war-paint and vegetable oils, as to be too hideous in aspect and repulsive in odour to render the attempt at all pleasant.
So the darkness of the third night closed upon us, and undecided as to any mode of escape, we sat gazing with longing eyes on the little bit of blue sky that was visible through the hole, which by day afforded light and air into our den.
A single star of uncommon brilliance shone through it now, and so brightly as to cast the form of the loophole upon the floor like a little white patch.
"If once we were out of this place," said Hartly, for the twentieth time, "I would certainly trust to my two hands and pair of heels for doing the rest."
"The town walls seem a high palisade."
"Yes. I had a good view of them for an hour and more on the unlucky day I first arrived in Benin. And yet, Jack," he added, kindly, "I am glad those devils brought me here, after all—we should never have met again else. The town walls are a double palisade, sparred over on the outside and in—double sheathed a sailor would call it—and then the whole is plastered over with red clay."
"Their height——"
"Is not less than twelve feet; and at those parts of the town which are without a rampart, there is a ditch of great depth, full of slime and poisonous serpents, and bordered by an impassable hedge of brambles, through which fire alone could make its way."
If I attempted to sleep, I was haunted by visions of being buried alive in that enormous tomb, from which there could be no escape—buried amid a hecatomb of hideous and sweltering negro corpses and the dead royalty of a savage race. The pictures my imagination drew of the future nearly distracted me; and I began to consider whether it was not better, by rushing barehanded and unarmed upon our captors, to provoke a more speedy and merciful death under their knives, asseguys, or muskets; and failing an escape, Hartly agreed with me that it was a wiser alternative; but Heaven lent us its helping hand ere the third night was passed.
On this night, for more than an hour, there was an unusual beating of tum-tums, and the chorus of some barbaric songs stole upon the wind at times from that quarter of the royal dwelling in which the wives of the late King Zabadie were enclosed.
During the past day the digging in the courtyard had ceased; and this circumstance, together with the sounds we heard (the adoration of some great fetish, or idol), made us tremble in our hearts lest the following day might see us placed in that more horrible prison, from whence there could be no release but by death.
We mutually expressed our fears of this; and so absorbed were we in this terrible surmise, that some time elapsed before we perceived that the blue of the sky and the light of the stars had disappeared; that a thick vapour had overspread both—that rain was pattering heavily on the flat roofs of the wooden city; and that thunder, the deep, hoarse thunder of the tropics, which sounds as if it would rend the earth in twain, was roaring athwart the darkened firmament.
The rain now poured down in such mighty torrents, that we listened to the din of its fall in silent wonder; for it seemed as if once again that "all the fountains of the great deep had broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened."
Ere long we felt the drops descending upon us, tepid and sulphureous, as the clay coating that covered the split canes, or lathing, which, formed the roof of our prison, soon became a puddle; while the straw and leaves on which we usually sat or reclined, were reduced to a mass of wetted mire.
For nearly an hour this continued, till our den became so thoroughly wet, that when the rain was over not a single dry spot could we find; and (as Hartly said) King Zabadie's trench in the courtyard would have the water some fathoms deep in it by this time.
On the rain ceasing, and the clouds dispersing, which they did as suddenly as the storm had come on, we saw the stars shining through a breach which the moisture had made in the roof, and something like a branch that was waving to and fro fell on my upturned face.
I grasped it.
It was the strong sinewy tendril of a climbing convolvulus, which had fallen through the aperture. I drew it down, so far as it would come, and then another branch fell in. On this I called joyously to Hartly, that "here were the first means of escape!"
Without a moment's hesitation he grasped them, twisted them together, and with sailor-like agility swung himself up, hand over hand, till he reached the crevice through which they had fallen.
Supporting the whole weight of his body by the left hand, with the right he tore down a mass of the fragile roof, and swinging himself up, passed through and at length stood upon the outside.
"Now, Jack," said he, "come up in the same fashion, hand over hand—it is just like going through the lubber's hole, instead of over the futtock shrouds. Bravo! we'll weather this dead devil of a king and his armed wenches to boot."
I dragged myself up by the twisted tendrils, but when near the hole should have fallen to the ground, had not Hartly's strong and friendly hands grasped and dragged me on to the roof, where for a little time we lay flat on our faces, panting alike with exertion and excitement, and listening anxiously to hear if any guards or watchers were near us.
By the starlight we could see the long rows of flat wooden huts which composed the palace divided into various courts. At the distance of three hundred yards from us, on our right, a ruddy glow that deepened into crimson, then wavered, sunk, and flashed up again, revealed the outline of a monstrous fetish, or wooden idol, of hideous aspect, which the young King, his fiadoors, guards, and people were worshipping; and we could see the woolly heads bowed before it packed thick and close as cannon balls in Woolwich arsenal.
The long vista of the great street of huts, which stretches the entire length of the town, and is alleged to be three miles long, lay upon our left.
We had no guide to the ramparts or outskirts; but as the long extent of this street seemed empty and silent, our best chance of ultimate escape lay through it.
Again grasping the tendrils of the convolvulus, we slid down from the roof and reached the ground. Robert Hartly dropped first. When I was following, the tendrils gave way, and I fell heavily, making thus a noise which roused a large dog in an adjacent shed, where it barked furiously; but as we lay close and still, it gradually ceased, and growled itself off to sleep again.
We were in a garden attached to the King's residence; and being (by our white skins) liable to immediate pursuit, capture, or destruction, the moment we were seen—a contingency that would become a certainty when day broke—we hurried through it, getting our legs and feet severely cut and torn by the flowers and prickly plants; but of this minor evil we had no heed at that time.
A paling of split canes was soon surmounted, and once more we found ourselves in the long street of Benin.
"If once we are free from the town," said Hartly, "we can find concealment during the day, and by travelling at night may reach the coast. Then, if we can but obtain a canoe, and pass over to one of the little isles in the Bight, we might remain there snugly enough, till some ship ran in on the same unlucky errand which brought poor Baylis here."
"I pray it may end as you say."
"Courage, Jack! Energy and faith will work miracles!"
"But I imagine——"
"Don't talk of imagination; it may only paralyse you by the fears it fashions, the danger it suggests; but hush!"
At that moment the fire before the idol flared up broad and redly, and then the mingled roar of many voices swelled upon the night air.
High above the hedge-rows or kraals for containing cattle, and the lines of countless huts, formed of turf, of wickered cane, and other rude materials which the wild vines, creepers, and convolvuli concealed, rose the lurid flame that blazed before the misshapen god of Benin; and far across the flat city it cast the shadows of the tall giraffe trees, which grew in rows around the palace wall.
This red light mingled with the pale white lustre of the moon, which was just rising at the horizon, from whence its splendour cast long and steady shadows across the streets, and thereby favoured alike our concealment and escape.
As we hurried along the empty thoroughfares towards the town wall, Hartly found at the door of a hut, a war-club, of which he immediately took possession. It was formed of teak-wood, black as ebony, ponderously heavy, and its knob was covered by elaborate carvings.
While our hearts alternately glowed with hope, or sank with apprehension, unseen we reached the high wall of wood and clay, and ran alongside it, in search either of an outlet, or some means of surmounting it; but no wild creepers, no gourd vines or climbing convolvuli were permitted to grow there.
We had been out of our prison at least half-an-hour without being met or seen by a single negro.
At last we reached a place where, for more than a hundred feet, the wall was breached by the recent storm of wind and rain, which had overturned and beaten its ruins flat on the ground.
With mutual exclamations of joy, we were proceeding to clamber over the fallen piles of rotten palisades and clay, when a wretched negro, who appeared suddenly, on perceiving the whiteness of our skins in the bright moonlight, uttered a loud cry of wonder or alarm!
In an instant we heard the clatter of steel, and at least a dozen of the King's armed women issued from a kind of wooden tower which stood near the fallen wall.
Hartly uttered something very like an oath; he struck the negro to the earth by a blow of his club, and crying—"Follow me, Jack!" sprang over the scattered ruin, and rushed into the moonlit country beyond.
Swift of foot and active as these "fair viragoes" were, they proved no match for us in a race for life or death, especially when encumbered ty their muskets, asseguys, and red petticoats, which were covered with heavy beads, lions' teeth, and grass braiding.
Two shots were fired after us, but where the balls went, Heaven only knows; fortunately, they fell far from us.
On we ran in the full blaze of the moonlight, bathed in perspiration, now floundering among wild gourds and creeping plants, where little snakes started up to hiss at us; anon over waste tracts, where lilies and geraniums covered all the wilderness; then among long and serrated grass, which cut our shins like saws and sabre-blades. Next we tore a passage through dense masses of wild canes, then through fields of maize, or rice, or millet, and often through cattle kraals, till we reached a wood, where, after taking the precaution of running in one direction in the full light of the moon, we turned and, hare-like, doubled in the other.
By this manoeuvre, I believe, we baffled our fair pursuers, as we saw no more of them for the remainder of that night or the following morning, during the long hours of which we lay close to the earth, buried and hidden under a cool and shady mass of leaves and jungle.
And there, without water to quench our thirst, and without other food than a few wild berries that grew within arm's length of our lurking place, we lay concealed during the whole of the next day.
When night fell, Hartly climbed into a chestnut-tree, and after looking carefully around him, uttered an exclamation of delight.
"I see the way we must steer, Jack," he added.
"You can see the ocean?"
"Ay, or a large river, rippling in the moonlight to the horizon far away."
A sigh of joy escaped me.
"And so, Jack, if our company is necessary to complete the happiness of King Zabadie in the next world, I am sorry for him, as he is likely to take his long voyage without us."
The chestnut was lofty, and from it Hartly could see on one hand the distant hills which form the termination of that mighty chain, the mountains of Kong, and end at the river Formosa. On the other hand, beyond the flat and open country, he could see the great river itself, flowing towards the Bight of Benin, along whose shores and by whose waters lay all our ultimate hope of escape.
We bathed ourselves in a limpid pool to freshen and brace our nerves; I armed me with a cudgel formed of a young tree torn up by the roots; Hartly had still his war-club; and resolving to travel only under cloud of night, as cautiously as possible, and to avoid all negro camps and villages, we found the highway—if it could be called so—which leads from the city of Benin towards the Waree.
In our ignorance of the wild country through which we travelled, our sole guide towards the sea was the course of the river Formosa, which rapidly widened into a mighty estuary, along the left bank of which we proceeded with the utmost circumspection; and inspired by the triple dread of being recaptured and killed by the natives, devoured by wild animals, or sinking under the heavy miasma which exhales from the marshy creeks and isles of the uncounted river-mouths which there pour their muddy tides into the Bight of Benin, laden with the decaying vegetable débris of an unexplored world.
By various sounds which the wind swept after us at times, such as the baying of dogs, and notes of cane horns, we feared a pursuit by the people of Benin, and the sequel proved that our fears were but too true.
We were frequently bewildered by seeing large lakes, which we conceived to be the sea, till dawn of day would reveal their size, and the gigantic trees or walls of wavy reeds which surrounded their stagnant waters.
Hartly often beguiled the way by relating strange stories he had heard or read, and by the margin of one of those silent lakes in the wilderness he told me of the shattered hull of an ancient ship being found, beached upon the bank of one of those inland waters in the continent of Africa.
"How came it to be cast up there?" I asked, with surprise.
"Some alleged that it came through a subterraneous opening, a channel in the bowels of the earth, connected with the same vortex or whirlpool which had sucked it down long years ago—the Maelstrom, perhaps, though many say that, like Charybdis, no such place exists. But it sounds very like a bouncing yarn, such as one may hear at the Royal Society, or under the leech of the foresail of a fine night, Jack, when the middle watch are spinning their twisters."
We spent a whole night wearily and anxiously circumnavigating the banks of one of those lakes whose waters were full of thick green slime, of sturdy reeds, and leaves of wondrous size and form; falling into black quagmires and deep holes made by the clumsy hippopotami, and every instant in danger of being pounced upon by a panther or a poisonous snake for our intrusion upon their secluded domains.
It is in these lakes of Benin, and in those of the kingdom of Angola, that the quaint old writer named Dapper (who must have been a very fanciful or credulous personage) relates he saw "water animals which the negroes call ambisiangula, and the Portuguese pezze-moueller. These monsters are both male and female. They are eight feet long and four broad, with short arms and long fingers of three joints, like ours. They have an oval head and eyes, a high forehead, a flat nose, and great mouth. Snares are laid for them, and when caught, they sigh and cry like women till they are killed by darts. Their entrails and flesh are like those of hogs in scent, taste, and form. 'Tis said the filings of certain skull-bones in the males, if mixed with wine, are an excellent remedy against gravel, and the bone which extends towards the membrane of the ear is good against bad vapour, if we may believe the Portuguese."
Master Dapper then goes on to state, that of the ribs of this wonderful fish, particularly those on the left side, surgeons can make a powder which will effectually stanch bleeding, and that bracelets made of them were worn for the preservation of health. Another account, published in 1714, adds, that in the Cabinet of Rarities at Leyden one of their hands is preserved, and two others were in the Musæum Regium at Copenhagen.
We, however, never saw aught but the fibrous leaves of enormous aquatic plants, large as table-cloths, floating on the water of these lakes, under the clear lustre of a lovely moon, that cast the shadows of the feathery palm and bending orange-trees from banks where the alligator dozed amid the slime, or the hippopotamus came to crop the herbage and bask in the rays of the sun when he rose above the foliage of the vast untrodden forest.
Manfully we struggled on, supporting nature by such fruits and esculents as we found, especially yams, and on the sixth night after our escape, with a prayer of thankfulness, we found ourselves under the friendly shelter of a chestnut grove, and close upon the shore of the mighty sea.
We were now so scorched and burned by the sun, and so embrowned by daily and nightly exposure, that we might very well have passed for a couple of mulattoes, and so have claimed kindred with our tormentors.