The formality of asking these men whether they were willing to serve was never gone through, many of them did so unwillingly; and it must be remembered that they were all savages in the strictest sense of the word, entirely unacquainted with civilisation, and with no knowledge of the English language. The majority of them were natives of the Congo and of Great and Little Popo, two towns on the western frontier of Dahomey; and it may be here remarked that the negroes of these districts have maintained their reputation for ultra-barbarism even to the present day.
The only result to be anticipated from such a wholesale drafting of savages into a regiment was a mutiny, and every inducement to mutiny appears to have been afforded them. Instead of dividing them proportionately between the head-quarters and the detachments, they were nearly all kept at the former; and but three weeks before the actual rising, as if to further remove all check, 100 rank and file, all old soldiers, were sent from Trinidad and distributed between St. Lucia and Dominica. Thus, on June 18th, 1837, the day of the mutiny, with the exception of the band, officers servants, and mess-waiters, all the men at San Josef's barracks, Trinidad, were slaver recruits. The ringleader of the movement was one Dâaga, or Donald Stewart, and the following account of him, and of the mutiny, is taken from Kingsley's "At Last":
"Donald Stewart, or rather Dâaga, was the adopted son of Madershee, the old and childless king of the tribe called Paupaus,[46] a race that inhabit a tract of country bordering on that of the Yarrabas.[47] These races are constantly at war with each other.
"Dâaga was just the man whom a savage, warlike, and depredatory tribe would select for their chieftain, as the African negroes choose their leaders with reference to their personal prowess. Dâaga stood six feet six inches without shoes. Although scarcely muscular in proportion, yet his frame indicated in a singular degree the union of irresistible strength and activity.... He had a singular cast in his eyes, not quite amounting to that obliquity of the visual organs denominated a squint, but sufficient to give his features a peculiarly forbidding appearance; his forehead, however, although small in proportion to his enormous head, was remarkably compact and well formed. The whole head was disproportioned, having the greater part of the brain behind the ears; but the greatest peculiarity of this singular being was his voice. In the course of my life I never heard such sounds uttered by human organs as those formed by Dâaga. In ordinary conversation he appeared to me to endeavour to soften his voice—it was a deep tenor: but when a little excited by any passion (and this savage was the child of passion) his voice sounded like the low growl of a lion, but when much excited it could be compared to nothing so aptly as the notes of a gigantic brazen trumpet.
"Dâaga having made a successful predatory expedition into the country of the Yarrabas, returned with a number of prisoners of that nation. These he, as usual, took bound and guarded towards the coast to sell to the Portuguese. The interpreter, his countryman, called these Portuguese 'white gentlemen.' The white gentlemen proved themselves more than a match for the black gentlemen; and the whole transaction between the Portuguese and the Paupaus does credit to all concerned in this gentlemanly traffic in human flesh.
"Dâaga sold his prisoners, and under pretence of paying him, he and his Paupau guards were enticed on board a Portuguese vessel: they were treacherously overpowered by the Christians, who bound them beside their late prisoners, and the vessel sailed over 'the great salt water.'
"This transaction caused in the breast of the savage a deep hatred against all white men; a hatred so intense that he frequently, during and subsequent to the mutiny, declared he would eat the first white man he killed; yet this cannibal was made to swear allegiance to our sovereign on the Holy Evangelists, and was then called a British soldier.
"On the voyage the vessel on board which Dâaga had been entrapped was captured by the British. He could not comprehend that his new captors liberated him: he had been overreached and trepanned by one set of white men, and he naturally looked on his second captors as more successful rivals in the human, or rather inhuman, Guinea trade; therefore, this event lessened not his hatred for white men in the abstract.
"I was informed by several of the Africans who came with him, that when, during the voyage, they upbraided Dâaga with being the cause of their capture, he pacified them by promising that when they should arrive in white man's country he would repay their perfidy by attacking them in the night. He further promised that if the Paupaus and Yarrabas would follow him, he would fight his way back to Guinea. This account was fully corroborated by many of the mutineers, especially those who were shot with Dâaga; they all said the revolt never would have happened but for Donald Stewart, as he was called by the officers; but Africans who were not of his tribe called him Longa-longa, on account of his height.
"Such was the extraordinary man who led the mutiny I am about to relate.