"The king is a savage emperor of the deepest and blackest dye. His reign is a reign of terror. He rules his unhappy subjects with rods of iron and knives of steel. I hope you'll never see what I have seen there. The sight of those human sacrifices, boy, would return to your dreams for years afterwards. They do to mine, whenever I am ill or troubled."
"You saw them, sir?"
"I was despatched on a mission of peace, one might say. I had a body-guard of fifty armed men, and blue-jackets and marines, and had need been, we could have fought our way to our boats through all the king's fanatics.
"The mission was this. You must know that all the coast-line is British, and the people at home were constantly being shocked to hear of the terrible human sacrifices occurring in Benin, while it was nothing uncommon to find a mutilated and headless corpse, that the sharks had spared, cast up with outspread arms on the beach."
"Terrible!" said Dr. Grant.
"Yes. And my mission was not to take revenge, but to endeavour pacifically to get the king to give up those massacres of men, women, and helpless children, for whom he had no more pity than the self-named sportsmen who follow the Queen's hounds have for the innocent and hunted stag.
"The king was amply supplied with bad rum or arrack, the worst and most fiery of all spirits. He got this stuff from the palm-oil traders of Gato, men who came from Portugal and even Britain itself.
"He was three sheets in the wind when we arrived on a beautiful afternoon. He told us, through our interpreter, how delighted he was to see us, and how he would give us a grand show next morning.
"We occupied portions of his grass-hut palace, keeping well together after lying down on grass mats, with our arms by our sides; for as the king had got drunker and drunker, and was now yelling and whooping like a madman, we feared he would make an attempt to murder us all before morning.
"You see, Creggan, that cutting throats was a fancy or fad of this brutal monarch's, just as collecting foreign stamps is with most English boys.