“On came the canoe, low and dark, black with men, the paddles tossing the white water in the air. On it came, shot swiftly past us, arched round, and came close alongside. Then arose a storm of angry voices, Quengueza’s raised above the rest.
“‘What does he say, Mafuk?’
“‘Says we must go back.’”
And go back they were forced to do, for just at that moment another war-boat came gliding along, and the whole party were taken prisoners, Quengueza embracing his “dear friend,” and being quite lively and jocular by reason of his success in recapturing him. Yet this man, superstitious as he was, and dreading above all things the small-pox, that scourge of savage nations, took into his own hut a favorite little slave, who had been seized with small-pox, laid the boy on a mat close to his own bed, and insisted on nursing him throughout the illness.
Afterward, when the small-pox had swept through the country, and almost desolated it, the sorrow of Quengueza was great and unfeigned. Wives, slaves, and relations had all been carried off by the dreaded plague; the town of Goumbi, where he lived, was deserted; and the poor old chief was obliged to collect the few survivors of his clan, and establish a new settlement on the opposite side of the river. His lamentations had all the sublimity of intense grief, and he sat chanting his monody over the dead, just as Catlin describes a North American chief when his tribe had perished by the same fearful disease.
No malady is so terrible to the savage as small-pox. Scarcely susceptible of bodily pain, enduring the most frightful wounds with quiet composure, and tenacious of life to an astonishing degree, he succumbs instantly to sickness; and an ailment which a white man resists and finally throws off, will in nine cases out of ten be fatal to the black one. Yet for himself Quengueza had no fears, and his sole lamentations were for his friends. “The Bakalai,” said he, “are all gone; the Rembo people are all gone; my beloved Monbou (his head slave) is gone; I am alone in the world.”
In spite of the many barbarous customs of the Camma tribes, they have a code of minutely regulated etiquette. If, for example, the king holds a council, he takes his seat on an elevated throne, and bears in his hand a wooden staff. When he has had his say, he passes the staff to the person who is to speak next, and he in turn to his successor. In such meetings the utmost order is preserved, and no one thinks of interrupting the speaker so long as he has possession of the staff.
It is not every one who has the right of speech in the council. This is a privilege extended to a very few men called Councillors, or Makagas, and only to them does the king hand the staff which gives the permission to speak. They are exceedingly jealous of this honor, and yet it has been conferred upon two white men, one being M. du Chaillu, and the other a Captain Lawlin of New York. The latter individual caused quite a revolution in his district, abolishing the many impediments to trade, indicting severe penalties on quarrelsome chiefs who made warlike aggressions on their neighbors, and establishing a strict code of criminal laws.
Some such arrangements as the possession of the orator’s staff is absolutely necessary for the due regulation of the innumerable “palavers,” or native parliaments, that are continually being held on all sorts of subjects. If one trader overreaches another, and can be detected in time, a palaver is held; and a similar ceremony is gone through if a trader pays for goods in advance and does not receive them. Runaway wives are the most fertile source of palavers, and, if the accused be proved guilty, the penalty is very severe. Generally the offending wife has her nose and ears cut off, and a similar punishment is inflicted on the man with whom she is found; but the latter has the privilege of commuting this sentence for a fine—generally a slave. Murder is a frequent cause of palavers, and it is a rather remarkable fact that the natives draw no distinction between accidental homicide and wilful murder. Death is not necessarily the punishment of homicide, but, as a rule, a heavy fine is substituted for the capital penalty.
If the culprit cannot be captured, the injured husband has a singular mode of procuring a palaver. He goes out and kills the first man he meets, proclaiming that he has done so because some one has run away with his wife. The course of justice then passes out of his hands. The relatives of the murdered man are now bound to take up the quarrel, which they do by killing, not the murderer, but some one of another village. His friends retaliate upon a third village, and so the feud passes from one village to another until the whole district is in arms. The gates are barricaded, no one dares to go out alone, or unarmed, and at last one unfortunate clan has a man murdered and can find no chance of retaliation. The chief of the clan then holds a palaver, and puts forward his claim against the man who ran away with the wife. The chief of the delinquent’s clan then pays a fine, the affair is settled, and peace is restored.