‘But I don’t want to poison the cat!’
‘Oh, dere a strange cat in a stable; me give it her.’
He did so; and the cat was dead in half an hour.
Again the fellow tried, watching when the three white men, as was their custom, should dine together, that he might poison them all. And again the black servant foiled him, though afraid to accuse him openly. This time it was—‘You no drink a water in a filter.’ And when the filter was searched, it was full of poison-leaves.
A third attempt the rascal made with no more success; and then vanished from Sierra Leone; considering—as the Obeah-men in the West Indies are said to hold of the Catholic priests—that ‘Buccra Padre’s Obeah was too strong for his Obeah.’
I know not how true the prevailing belief is, that some of these Obeah-men carry a drop of snake’s poison under a sharpened finger-nail, a scratch from which is death. A similar story was told to Humboldt of a tribe of Indians on the Orinoco; and the thing is possible enough. One story, which seemingly corroborates it, I heard, so curiously illustrative of Negro manners in Trinidad during the last generation, that I shall give it at length. I owe it—as I do many curious facts—to the kindness of Mr. Lionel Fraser, chief of police of the Port of Spain, to whom it was told, as it here stands, by the late Mr. R---, stipendiary magistrate; himself a Creole and a man of colour:—
‘When I was a lad of about seventeen years of age, I was very frequently on a sugar-estate belonging to a relation of mine; and during crop-time particularly I took good care to be there.
‘Owing to my connection with the owner of the estate, I naturally had some authority with the people; and I did my best to preserve order amongst them, particularly in the boiling-house, where there used to be a good deal of petty theft, especially at night; for we had not then the powerful machinery which enables the planter to commence his grinding late and finish it early.
‘There was one African on the estate who was the terror of the Negroes, owing to his reputed supernatural powers as an Obeah-man.
‘This man, whom I will call Martin, was a tall, powerful Negro, who, even apart from the mysterious powers with which he was supposed to be invested, was a formidable opponent from his mere size and strength.