But his long beard and moustache are as white as the paper on which I am writing. His brow is wrinkled, and the eyes that glint and glare from beneath the bushy eye-brows are as quick and fierce as those of a golden eagle.
Those Arabs hate the English with a deadly hatred. Even the sight of a blue-jacket makes them scowl. I have passed—more than once—a doorway in Zanzibar, in which one of these men stood, and I have seen him gnash his teeth at the sight of my uniform, and finger his sword or knife, nervously, restlessly, as if he hardly could keep from plucking it out and plunging it into my heart.
It was in pursuit of one of the dhows manned by such gentleman Arabs that the Bunting had been all the previous afternoon.
Had the wind fallen earlier, this dhow would soon have been a prize; but as it did not, she had shown them a clean pair of heels, and might now be anywhere.
That she was a slaver without papers there was not a doubt, and well laden too, for she was deep in the water.
I am going to make a terrible statement, but it is a true one, and if it only has the effect of causing even one of my readers to hate slavery half as much as I do, it will not be made in vain.
Just then, as American traders in crossing the Atlantic, when a dangerous gale comes on, lighten the ship by throwing the cattle overboard, so, at times, do these gentleman Arabs lighten their dhows when chased.
It is a terrible sight to see poor oxen hoisted up in straps with block and tackle and whirled into the storm-lashed ocean. O God, how mournfully they moan, how they seem to plead for mercy! That moan once heard can never, never be forgotten.
The loading of a slave-ship is a terrible sight, but ah! the ruthless cruelty of lightening a dhow of slaves. They are got up one by one or two by two. Children, poor young girls and boys, are pitched screaming into the sea, probably to be devoured by sharks next moment. And sharks speedily come to a feast of blood of this kind.
But whether men or women—if they struggle, and sometimes whether they struggle or not—they are ruthlessly slain on the deck before being thrown overboard. The knife across the neck is used for this terrible butchery. I have been told by eye-witnesses, themselves prisoners, and expecting every minute that their turn would come, that the victims are handed on deck to those who do the work, and that these latter think less about it than a farm servant does of killing a fowl, sometimes laughing and joking with their companions the while; and if telling a story of any kind, they do not even permit the murder they are committing from interrupting their discourse for a single moment.