The evening of the fourth day is the dreaded Evil Night, on which the king walks in solemn procession to the market-place, where the chief executioner with his own hand puts to death those victims who have been reserved. The precise nature of the proceedings is not known, as none are allowed to leave their houses except the king and his retinue; and any one who is foolish enough to break this law is carried off at once to swell the list of victims. It is said that the king speaks to the men, charging them with messages to his dead father, telling him that his memory is revered, and that a number of new attendants have been sent to him, and with his own hand striking the first blow, the others being slain by the regular executioner.
The bodies of the executed were now set upon a pole, or hung up by their heels, and exhibited to the populace, much as used to be done in England, when a thief was first executed, and then hung in chains.
The number of these victims has been much exaggerated. In the annual Customs, the number appears to be between sixty and eighty. Some thirty of these victims are men, and suffer by the hand of the chief executioner or his assistants; but it is well known that many women are also put to death within the palace walls, the bloodthirsty Amazons being the executioners. The mode of execution is rather remarkable. After the king has spoken to the victims, and dictated his messages, the executioners fall upon them and beat them to death with their official maces. These instruments are merely wooden clubs, armed on one side of the head with iron knobs. Some, however, say that the victims are beheaded; and it is very likely that both modes are employed.
As to the stories that have been so frequently told of the many thousand human victims that are annually slain, and of the canoe which is paddled by the king in a trench filled with human blood, they are nothing more than exaggerations invented by traders for the purpose of frightening Englishmen out of the country. Even in the Grand Customs which follow the decease of a king the number of victims is barely five hundred.
We may naturally ask ourselves what is the meaning of the Customs, or So-Sin. This ceremony is the accepted mode of doing honor to the late king, by sending to him a number of attendants befitting his rank. Immediately after his burial, at the Grand Customs, some five hundred attendants, both male and female, are despatched to the dead king, and ever afterward his train is swelled by those who are slain at the regular annual Customs.
Besides the Customs there is scarcely a day when executions of a similar character do not take place. Whatever the king does must be reported to his father by a man, who is first charged with the message and then killed. No matter how trivial the occasion may be—if a white man visits him, if he has a new drum made, or even if he moves from one house to another—a messenger is sent to tell his father. And if after the execution the king should find that he has forgotten something, away goes another messenger, like the postscript of a letter.
All this terrible destruction of human life, which is estimated by Burton as averaging five hundred per annum in ordinary years, and a thousand in the Grand Customs year, is bad enough, but not so bad as it has been painted. The victims are not simple subjects of the king selected for the sacrifice of bloodthirsty caprice, as has been generally supposed. They are either criminals or prisoners of war, and, instead of being executed on the spot, are reserved for the customs, and are treated as well as is consistent with their safe custody.
Indeed, considering the object for which they are reserved, it would be bad policy for the Dahoman king to behave cruelly toward his victims. They are intended as messengers to his father, about whom they are ever afterward supposed to wait, and it would be extremely impolitic in the present king to send to his father a messenger who was ill-disposed toward himself, and who might, therefore, garble his message, or deliver an evil report to the dead sovereign.
As a rule, the victims in question are quite cheerful and contented, and about as unlike our ideas of doomed men as can well be imagined. In the first place, they are constitutionally indifferent to human life, their own lives with those of others being equally undervalued; and, as they know that their lives are forfeit, they accept the position without useless murmurs. Nor is the mode of death so painful as seems at first sight to be the case, for the king, actuated by that feeling of pity which caused the Romans to stupefy with a soporific draught the senses of those who were condemned to the cross, mostly administers to the victims a bottle or so of rum about an hour before the execution, so that they are for the most part insensible when killed.
This humane alleviation of their sufferings is, however, restricted to those who die at the customs, and is not extended to those who perish by the hands of the executioner as messengers to the deceased king. How these executions are conducted may be seen by the following account of a scene at Dahome by Mr. Duncan:—