Africa and the American Flag

by Andrew H. Foote

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.”

F. E. Forbes, delt.

Lith. of Sarony & Co. N. Y.

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.