Tuesday, 28th.—This morning I visited the governor’s brother who has got the sore leg, as he had sent a fee, and could not come and see me. His left ankle was dreadfully ulcerated and swelled, and had been in the same state since the last rainy season. The leg was thin and wasted; and he complained of suffering much pain. He could move his toes very well; and inquiring if it was the effect of a hurt, he said no, that it had come on at the beginning of the last rains. I directed him to wash it clean night and morning with warm milk and water, to apply poultices night and day until the swelling was reduced, and on no account to drink spirits or palm wine: an advice which he did not at all admire, as he said when he drank it eased his pain and gave him sleep. I desired moreover that when the swelling in his leg was reduced by the poultices, he should put clean fat on a soft rag and lay over it, and on no account to drink any thing stronger than water. After my return home he sent me a present of a sheep, four fowls, eggs, milk, and honey. I now began to prepare for starting to Boussa in the morning at daybreak, but the taja is working against me, and I doubt being able to get off, as I have just learned that he does not leave this until Saturday next, and wishes to detain me also. The sky being clear, before the moon rose I was able to get the meridian altitude of the star Dubbe in the Great Bear, which gave the latitude of my house in Wawa, 9° 53′ 54″ north. Its longitude I calculate to be 5° 56′ east.

Wednesday, 29th.—Wawa is the capital of a province of the same name in the kingdom of Borgoo; it is in the form of a square, and may contain from eighteen to twenty thousand inhabitants. It is surrounded by a good high clay wall and dry ditch; and is one of the neatest, most compact, and best walled towns between this and Badagry. The streets are wide, spacious, and airy, the houses of the coozie, or circular hut form; the huts of each house being connected by a wall, forms an airy and open space inside, and does not take away from the regular appearance of the houses. One of the coozies next the street has two doors, which forms an entrance into the interior, into which the other coozies open. The plan of the one in which I lived may serve for all, except the governor’s and that of the widow Zuma. This plan will afford a fair specimen of the accommodations of Wawa. The governor’s house is surrounded by a clay wall, about thirty feet high, in the form of a square, having large coozies, shady trees, and square clay towers inside.

A. Sleeping and sitting-rooms.c. Little houses for holding grain.F. House of entrance.
B. Stables.D. Houses of the slaves.4. Places for cooking.

The marriages of the Wawanies are very simple. The pagans make up matters with the girl first, give the father or mother a present, and all is right. The Mahometans read the fatha, and make a present; read it again, and part, when tired of one another. The virtue of chastity I do not believe to exist in Wawa. Even the widow Zuma lets out her female slaves for hire, like the rest of the people of the town. Neither is sobriety held as a virtue. I never was in a place in my life where drunkenness was so general. Governor, priest, and layman, and even some of the ladies, drink to excess. I was pestered for three or four days by the governor’s daughter, who used to come several times in a day, painted and bedizened in the highest style of Wawa fashion, but always half tipsy; I could only get rid of her by telling her that I prayed and looked at the stars all night, never drank any thing stronger than roa-in-zafir, which they call my tea,—literally hot water: she always departed in a flood of tears. Notwithstanding their want of chastity, and drunkenness, they are a merry people, and have behaved well to me. They appear to have plenty of the necessaries of life, and a great many of the luxuries, some of which they would be better without; this being the direct road from Bornou, Houssa, and Nyffé, to Gonja, Dahomey, and Jannah. Since the war between the Fellatas and people of Yourriba, they are able to procure plenty of European articles, such as pewter jugs and dishes, copper pans, earthenware, Manchester cottons, &c. Their fruits are limes, plantains, bananas, and several wild fruits in the season. Their vegetables are yams, calalou, or the leaves of a plant which they use in their soups, as we do greens or cabbage; grain, doura, Indian corn, and millet. Fish they procure in great plenty from the Quorra and its tributary streams: those I have seen were all smoked, and principally a kind of catfish. Their best and largest horses come from Bornou: the native breed are small, like the Shetland ponies, hardy, active, and generally of a brown or mouse colour. Oxen are in great plenty, principally in the hands of the Fellatas; sheep and goats are also plentiful; domestic fowls plenty and cheap; honey and bees’ wax abundant; ivory and ostrich feathers they say are to be procured in great plenty, but they can get no sale for them. The country abounds in wild animals of all the different kinds to be found in Africa. Slaves are numerous: the males are employed in weaving, collecting wood or grass, or on any other kind of work; some of the women are engaged in spinning cotton with the distaff and spindle, some in preparing the yarn for the loom, others in pounding and grinding corn, some cooking and preparing cakes, sweetmeats, natron, yams, and accassons, and others selling these articles at the markets; the older female slaves are principally the spinners. The mere labour is very light, and a smart English servant would accomplish their hardest day’s work in one hour: but if their labour be light their food is also light, being confined to two meals a day, which almost invariably consist of paste of the flour of yams, or millet, in the morning about nine o’clock, and a thicker kind, approaching to pudding, after sunset, and this only in small quantities; flesh, fowl, or fish, they may occasionally get, but only by a very rare chance. Their owners, in fact, fare very little better: perhaps a little smoke-dried fish, or some meat now and then; principally only a little palm oil, or vegetable butter, in addition to their paste or pudding; but they indulge freely in drinking palm wine, rum, and bouza.

Of the slaves for sale I can say but little, and a stranger sees very little of them. In fact when not going on a journey to some slave mart, or sent out to the wells or rivers in the mornings to wash, they are seldom seen. Even then they are fastened neck to neck with leather thongs; and when this duty is over, they are confined closely in the houses until they are marched off. When on their march, they are fastened night and day by the neck with leather thongs or a chain, and in general carry loads; the refractory are put in irons, in addition to the other fastening, during the night. They are much afraid of being sold to the sea coast, as it is the universal belief that all those who are sold to the whites are eaten; retorting back on us the accusation of cannibalism, of which they have perhaps the greatest right to blame us. The slaves sold to the sea coast are generally those taken in war, or refractory and intractable domestic slaves. Nyffé at present is the place that produces the most slaves, owing to the civil war raging in that country.

The people of Wawa would take beads in exchange for any articles their country might produce; also brass bracelets for the arms and legs; brass, copper, pewter, and earthenware dishes; Manchester cottons of gaudy colours, and calicoes. Their arms are bows and poisoned arrows, and light spears. They say they do not like war, but appear to be very tenacious in not permitting interference with their country; and they like the Fellatas better than their neighbours of Kiama, of whom they are very jealous. They have a good character for honesty; are cheerful, good-natured, and hospitable; and no people in Africa that I have met with are so ready to give information about the country as they are; and, what is very extraordinary, I have not seen a common beggar amongst them. They deny their Borgoo origin, and say they are descended from the people of Nyffé and Houssa. Their language is a dialect of the Yourriba: but the Wawa women are very good-looking, and the Youriba women are not: the men are strong and well made, but have a debauched look. Their religion is partly a loose Mahometanism, and partly pagan. The most pious of the former can only say a few prayers, or go through the necessary forms, and are called Malem, or learned: the latter are called Kaffirs; and what they worship it is hard to tell; every man choosing his own god, which they pray to that he may intercede with the Supreme Being for them; and they offer sheep, dogs, and sometimes a bullock, according to the benefit they expect. A woman is sent to the market and sold, if, when she has a child at the breast, she is known to go with a man, and, in addition, loses her child, and is flogged.

In this country, as well as in all others I have passed between this and the sea, I have met with tribes of Fellatas, some of whom are not Mahometans, but pagans. They certainly are the same people, as they speak the same language, have the same features and colour, except those who have crossed with the negro. They are as fair as the lower class of Portugueze or Spaniards, lead a pastoral life, shifting from place to place, as they find grass for their horned cattle, and live in temporary huts of reeds or long grass.

Thursday, 30th.—Having had every thing prepared last night for starting this morning at day-break, I went and took leave of the governor, who repeated his promises of sending my baggage on to Koolfu. On my return from the governor, I met a messenger of the sultan of Boussa, who had been sent expressly for me. He said he would just wait on the governor, and deliver a message, and follow me. I left Wawa, mounted on an old red roan mare of the governor’s, on a good road, leading through a woody country, with numerous plantations of yams, and Indian corn. At 8.30 A.M. passed a village about a quarter of a mile from the south side of a range of low rocky hills, running in a direction from east-south-east to west-south-west by compass. The rocks were composed of pudding-stone, the white quartz pebbles of which were square, not rounded, and imbedded in a gray substance. At the end of an opening in the range was a beautiful sugar-loaf mountain, overlooking all the rest, and bearing from the village east-south-east, distance half a mile. This I presumed to call Mount George, after his present majesty George the Fourth. After passing the village and entering amongst the hills, I found the valleys well cultivated, and planted with yams, corn, and maize, but the road winding and rocky. At 10 A.M. came to the village of Injum, the first belonging to the province of Boussa. Here I halted, until the messenger, who had joined me some time before, got his breakfast. This village is on the north-east side of the hills. Amongst the number of people who came to look at me was a woman, whose face, neck, right breast, and part of her right arm, were covered with a scurf, like a person very ill with the small pox: the borders of the scurf were bare, raw, and inflamed. This is the disorder the young man’s mother died of, to whom I gave the medicines at Kiama. When the disease reaches the toes and fingers, they first contract, and then drop off; when, in a short time after, the unfortunate person is relieved by death, as they have no cure for it, nor do they attempt any. I called the woman, and asked her if she suffered much pain: she said no, nor did it itch. She sent for some yams, and offered them, as she said my looking at her would do her good.

At 10.30 the messenger having finished his breakfast, we left Injum. He gave me his horse to ride, as I could not get the old Wawa mare to go on without a great deal of beating. At noon halted at the side of a brook, to water the horses. Here end the hills and the pudding-stone of which they are composed, and the rocks are now a dark gray slate, which moulders away with the rains, the soil a strong blue clay, with deep gullies formed by the rains. At 1 left the brook: the country thickly wooded with tall trees, amongst which are a number of the acacia or mimosa, many of them thrown down by the elephants, for the purpose of feeding on the upper and tender branches. The traces of elephants, buffaloes, and the larger kind of antelopes called in Bornou corigum, are numerous. At 2.40 halted at a village of the Kumbrie, or Cambrie, a race of Kaffirs inhabiting the woods, on both sides of the river. They made a great difficulty in procuring me a drink of water, so I mounted and left them, and at 3.30 arrived at a branch of the Quorra, called the Menai, close to its junction with a second branch. The Menai is about twenty yards in breadth, and about two fathoms in depth; the current hardly perceptible, and the water dark and muddy; that of the branch into which it runs being about thirty yards in breadth, with a strong current, about three or four knots, throwing a back-water up the Menai. The island on the other side of it is low and swampy, and covered with high reeds; the colour of both the streams red and muddy, as if in flood; but the messenger, on my asking if this was the case, said no, that the river was now at its lowest mark, and pointing to a place on the opposite bank of the Menai, about fifteen feet above the present level, said the river rose to that height during the rains. The trees on both banks were close down to the water’s edge, and the branches were in the stream, and every now and then a branch would be broken off, and washed away by the strength of the current. From this, and the muddiness of the water, I concluded it was rising; but certainly the inhabitants must know best: had I not made inquiry, I should certainly have said it was rising. The canoe being on the other side of the Menai, the messenger stripped off his tobe, and swam over for it. After crossing and swimming the horses over, in about a quarter of an hour’s ride I entered the walls of Boussa, by the western gate. The walls appeared very extensive, and are at present under repair. Bands of male and female slaves, accompanied by drums and flutes, and singing in chorus, were passing to and from the river with water, to mix the clay they were building with. Each great man has his part of the wall to build, like the Jews when they built the walls of Jerusalem, every one opposite his own house.