“Yes.”
“Was he fat?”
“Yes.”
“Was he very ugly?”
“Yes.”
“Had he got a strawberry ...? No, I don’t mean that. Had he lost some of his front teeth?”
“Yes.”
Then the Commandant heaved a sigh of relief, and sent for a sergeant of police. When that myrmidon arrived he told him that he thought that Mr. W—— was caught at last; and directed him to take three or four men, and go and see if he could find anything in the fetish ground. While we were waiting to see the upshot of this search the Commandant informed me that my Christian friend, Mr. W——, was a notorious smuggler, who was famed for the facility with which he robbed Her Majesty’s Customs.
In about a quarter of an hour a procession, bearing some forty or fifty demijohns of rum, marched into the yard; and the sergeant informed us that he had left a man in charge of as much more. All this spirit had been smuggled from Porto Novo, and then hidden in the fetish-ground, where no native wandering in the outer darkness of unbelief would dare to venture; but which my Christian friend, who like all such negroes had repudiated the fetish moral, or immoral, code without adopting any other in its place, had no scruple about making use of. No wonder he was anxious that I should not outrage the religious prejudices of the Badagrans. I met him afterwards, and he called me names, and was good enough to say that my idle curiosity had caused him to lose more money than I had ever possessed or could dream of possessing. Such are the usual conversational pleasantries of negro traders.
From Badagry I went on to Porto Novo, which lies seventeen miles further to the west, or fifty miles in all from Lagos. A curious feature of the lagoon between Badagry and Porto Novo is the large number of floating grass islands which one passes. Some of them have sufficient stability to admit of persons walking about on them, and, were they but cultivated, would be not unlike the chinampas of the Aztecs on the lake of Mexico. They impede the navigation a good deal, as no steamer could force its way through them, and détours have to be made to avoid them, which frequently result in the repose of a sand-bank being rudely disturbed by the stem of an erring vessel. When disembarking from the steamer at Porto Novo I landed on one of these islands, about two acres in extent, and walked across it, sending the boat round to the opposite side. It seemed quite firm underfoot, except at the edges, and was covered with soil four or five inches deep, bearing a luxuriant crop of grass. It was kept afloat by an underlying mass of matted rushes, canes, and succulent grass, from three to four feet thick, but how the earth got on the top of this I do not know. This island was larger and more substantial than most, but all break up very rapidly in the mimic storms which occasionally vex the placid waters of the lagoon.