from ignorance. Oshupu did not think that it was more cruel to burn than to drown. The boy who "jumped like a dog" made him laugh; it did not occur to him that a grotesque gesture might have been occasioned by horrible pain. A king of Ashantee cut off the hands of a slave, and bade her search, his head for vermin with the stumps. If any one had accused him of barbarity, he would not have understood the accusation. It was his idea of a good practical joke.

Impassibility under suffering and indifference to death are common to most savages. The negroes die with the stolidity of sheep. But sometimes this becomes heroic.

A young man who had been caught in the harem of the King of Dahomey, about to enter the apartments of the wives, was condemned to die in the usual manner. He was tied on a scaffold, face downward, and the king's wives, according to law, brought wood to make a fire underneath. This young man, with a terrible death before him, suddenly burst out laughing. On being asked the reason, he replied that it struck him as being very amusing that those with whom he had passed so many agreeable nights should now be his executioners. He refused, always laughing, to betray any one in particular, and died without uttering a groan.

a

It may also seem strange that suicide should be common among the negroes. Bosman tells of a king on the Gold Coast who, being hard pressed by the Dutch, shot gold instead of bullets signal that he wished to parley. A truce was made; they adjourned to his palace; and in the midst of the negotiation he blew up his enemies and himself with gunpowder, dying the death of a Samson.

It is even common for a man to kill himself "on the head of another," as it is called. The other must either kill himself or pay an indefinitely heavy fine, and on that account it is frequently resorted to in revenge.

Adumissa, a beautiful red-skinned woman of Cape Coast Castle, had numerous lovers, but she rejected them all. One of them, in despair, shot himself " on her head," near the door of her house. His family demanded satisfaction, and, to save her relatives from a ruinous palaver, she determined to commit suicide. Having assembled all her friends and relatives, she shot herself before them with golden bullets. Her corpse, having been exposed in state, was buried with a profusion of cloth and gold. The legend of Adumissa is the favorite story by the evening fires of the Fantis, and her favorite patterned cloth still bears her name among them.

Such are the Red Africans-a race whose character is little known, but whom I believe to be far superior to the Red Indians of America.

It will be understood that the typical negroes, with whom the slavers are supplied, represent the dangerous, the destitute, and the diseased classes of African society. They may be compared to those which in England fill our jails, our work-houses, and our hospitals. So far from being equal to us, the polished inhabitants of Europe, as some ignorant people suppose, they are immeasurably below the Africans themselves.

The typical negro is the true savage of Africa, and I must paint the deformed anatomy of his mind, as I have already done that of his body.

The typical negroes dwell in petty tribes, where all are equal except the women, who are slaves; where property is common, and where, consequently, there is no property at all; where one may recognize the Utopia of philosophers, and observe the saddest and basest spectacles which humanity can afford.

The typical negro, unrestrained by moral laws, spends his days in sloth, his nights in debauchery. He smokes haschish till he stupefies his senses or falls into convulsions; he drinks palm wine till he brings on a loathsome disease; he abuses children; stabs the poor brute of a woman whose hands keep him from starvation, and makes a trade of his own offspring. He swallows up his youth in premature vice; he lingers through a manhood of disease; and his tardy death is hastened by those who no longer care to find him food.

Such are the "men and brothers" for whom their friends claim, not protection, but equality!

They do not merit to be called our brothers, but let us call them our children. Let us educate them carefully, and in time we may elevate them, not to our own level-that, I fear, can never be-but to the level of those from whom they have fallen.

If you wish to know what they have been and to what we may restore them, look at the portraits which have been preserved of the ancient Egyptians, and in those delicate and voluptuous forms -in those round, soft features-in those long, almond-shaped, half-closed, languishing eyes-in those full pouting lips, large smiling mouths, and complexions of a warm and copper-colored tint, you will recognize the true African type, the women-men of the Old World, of which the negroes are the base, the depraved cari

catures.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE REDEMPTION OF AFRICA.

Exploration.-Commerce. - Military Protection. -Christian Missions.-Mohammedan Civilization.-Future of Africa.

IF I have dragged the reader through these details of the polysyllabic sciences, it has been with some view toward a practical result. That he may judge how Africa can best be civilized, it is necessary that he should understand the character of the continent and its people.

The western coast of Africa has a ragged fringe of Portuguese, British, and French colonies. I have visited them all, and I find that the Portuguese are decaying; that the British are stagnant; that the French alone are progressing.

The interior of Africa is unknown to all but a few explorers. It is a new continent; or, rather, it is a new world.

Very little has hitherto been done by exploration in Western Africa. Lander discovered the mouth of the Niger, with which Villault de Bellefond was perfectly well acquainted in the sixteenth century. In spite of this success, he did not escape the fate of Mungo Park, of Clapperton, and of others, whose names, would form a tedious and dreary catalogue. In the expedition to the Congo all the officers died. In fact, the great explorations of Africa have ever been made from the east or from the north. Livingstone, Barth, Burton, Speke and Grant, are our great living explorers. None of these have started from the western side of Africa.

From the western equator it is impossible to enter Central Africa. The country is dense and virgin forest, through which there are no thoroughfares save the rivers, and these become unnavigable, even to a canoe, at a very short distance from the coast. Selecting the largest of these—the Gaboon-I went up it about a hundred miles. I was then encountered by a barrier of rocks. I found myself among high mountains. There the Gaboon from a river had become a torrent, whose fury no canoe could be made

to stem. I could go no farther. Even had my men been willing to accompany me, we could not have procured sufficient food in the dark and lifeless forest to sustain our lives. The natives of the country were not in the habit of making long journeys. They had come from the interior; if they migrated, it would be always toward the sea. Thus, in traveling from the east, one goes with the human tide, which in Africa rolls ever toward the west; but in traveling from the sea inland, one attempts to stem this stream of migration.

I found that in the Fernand Vaz it was possible to travel two days' journey farther into the interior than M. Du Chaillų had done. That is to say, they would take me from Ngumbi six days' journey in a southeasterly direction. To go farther, they said, would be impossible; for the last tribe which we would visit were always at war with the tribe beyond them, from whom they pro

cured their slaves.

In such a country as Western Africa, with its huge forests and its dreary swamps, it is impossible to travel without guides. As there is no communication between the tribes of the interior beyond a few days' journey; as every village is a turnpike at which one has to pay toll, and whose chief can prevent one from going a step farther; and as every fifty miles a fresh dialect is spoken, it is tolerably evident that, though in Western Equatorial Africa a few days will bring one on the terra incognita, on the blank space of the maps, there is no possibility of passing beyond the threshold. Lacépède, in his mémoire on the Central Plateau, recommends the exploration of the Congo, which, he says, will take the traveler directly into the plateau. That is true. There can be little doubt that, by following the northern branch of the Congo, one might penetrate into the very heart of Africa. But Captain Tuckey's expedition has proved that the same petty, yet insurmountable obstacles as in Equatorial Africa debar exploration.

"This excursion," he writes, "convinced us of the impracticability of penetrating with any number of men by land along the sides of the river, both from the nature of the country and the impossibility of procuring provisions." And again: "Hence I have never been able to procure a guide farther than from banza to banza, at the utmost a day's journey; for at every banza we were assured that, after passing the next, we should get into the Bushmen's country, where we would be in danger of being shot or kidnapped."

The route of the intrepid Livingstone, although attended with hardship and danger, was at least practicable. There has always been a regular inland communication between Angola and Mozambique. In 1809 Antonio de Saldanha da Gama, the Governor General of Angola, sent an expedition to Mozambique. It arrived there, and returned in safety, bringing letters from José de Oliveira Barbosa, the governor of the eastern colony.*

In a country which is broken up into small and independent principalities it is always difficult to travel. The only manner in which Central Africa (northward of Livingstone's route) might be explored from Southern Guinea would be by placing one's self under the protection of Matiamvo. The kingdom of this great potentate is three months distant from Loanda, and mulatto traders have gone there frequently enough, traveling on oxen. There the traveler would be certainly detained a long time, and it would depend entirely upon the complaisance of the king whether he would receive permission to pass on to the next kingdom, or be obliged to return.

There is a regular communication between the kingdoms of Dahomey and Ashantee and those of Abyssinia and Timbuctoo. It has, however, been always the policy of these monarchs to prevent white men from penetrating beyond their capitals, where, however, they always receive them with politeness and hospitality.

The Niger is the great thoroughfare of Guinea, and perhaps, in the rainy season, might be navigated in a small steamer as far as Timbuctoo. It is possible that the southern branches might conduct one toward the sources of the Congo, but whether such a voyage would be practicable I can not pretend to say.

There is only one method by which Central Africa can certainly be crossed by a European. It is from Senegambia. Mandingoes, as I have already said, travel to Timbuctoo, and even to Mecca. The Mandingo language, I have been informed, is alone sufficient for colloquial purposes to carry one to the latter city.

A knowledge of Arabic and the Koran, a bottle of walnutjuice, a hardy frame, and a compliance with the holy rite of circumcision, would carry a man through Africa—as a hadji to Mecca, through burning deserts and great dangers; or to Timbuctoo as a trader.

* Chronological Index of the Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries and Conquests of the Portuguese in parts beyond the Seas, from the beginning of the Fifteenth Century. Edited by the Cardinal Saraiga. Pp. 264-5.

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