The great Ju-ju house of the place is a most ghastly-looking edifice, and is well described by Captain Burton. It is built of swish, and is an oblong roofless house, of forty or fifty feet in length. A sort of altar is placed at the end, sheltered from the rain by a small roof of its own. Under the roof are nailed rows of human skulls mostly painted in different colors, and one of them is conspicuous by a large black beard, which is doubtless a rude copy of the beard worn by the man to whom it originally belonged. Between them are rows of goat skulls streaked with red and white, while other skulls are strewn about the floor, and others again are impaled on the tops of sticks. Under the altar is a round hole with a raised clay rim, in which is received the blood of the victims together with the sacred libations. Within this Ju-ju house are buried the bodies of the kings.
This house well illustrates the character of the people—a race which take a positive pleasure in the sight of blood, and in inflicting and witnessing pain. All over the country the traveller comes upon scenes of blood, pain, and suffering. There is hardly a village where he does not come upon animals tied in some agonizing position and left to die there. Goats and fowls are mostly fastened to posts with their heads downward, and blood is the favorite color for painting the faces of men. Even the children of prisoners taken in war—the war in question being mostly an unsuspected attack on an unprepared village—are hung by the middle from the masts of the canoes, while the parents are reserved to be sacrificed and eaten.
About this last statement there has been much incredulity, and of course, when questioned, the Bonny negroes flatly deny the accusation. There is, however, no doubt of the fact, inasmuch as Europeans have witnessed the act of cannibalism. For example, old King Peppel, the father of the Pimento whose life has been briefly sketched, gave a great banquet in honor of a victory which he had gained over Calabar, and in which Amakree, the king of that district, was taken prisoner. The European traders were invited to the banquet, and were most hospitably entertained. They were, however, horrified to see the principal dish which was placed before Peppel. It was the bleeding heart of Amakree, warm and palpitating as it was torn from the body. Peppel devoured the heart with the greatest eagerness, exclaiming at the same time, “This is the way I serve my enemies.”
More recently, Dr. Hutchinson witnessed a scene of cannibalism. He had heard that something of the kind was contemplated, although it was kept very quiet. On the appointed morning he had himself rowed to the shore at some distance from the Ju-ju house, near which he concealed himself, and waited for the result. The rest of the adventure must be told in his own words.
“I know not of what kind are the sensations felt by those around Newgate, waiting for an execution in the very heart of London’s great city; but I know that on the banks of an African river, in the gray dawn of morning, when the stillness was of that oppressive nature which is calculated to produce the most gloomy impressions, with dense vapors and foul smells arising from decomposing mangroves and other causes of malaria floating about, with a heaviness of atmosphere that depressed the spirits, amidst a community of cannibals, I do know that, although under the protection of a man-of-war, I felt on this occasion a combined sensation of suspense, anxiety, horror, and indefinable dread of I cannot tell what, that I pray God it may never be my fate to endure again.
“Day broke, and, nearly simultaneous with its breaking, the sun shone out. As I looked through the slit in the wall on the space between my place of concealment and the Ju-ju house, I observed no change from its appearance the evening before. No gibbet, nor axe, nor gallows, nor rope—no kind of preparation, nothing significant of death, save the skulls on the pillars of the Ju-ju house, that seemed leering at me with an expression at once strange and vacant. It would have been a relief in the awful stillness of the place to have heard something of what I had read of the preparations for an execution in Liverpool or London—of the hammering suggestive of driving nails into scaffold, drop, or coffin, of a crowd gathering round the place before early dawn, and of the solemn tolling of the bell that chimed another soul into eternity. Everything seemed as if nothing beyond the routine of daily life were to take place.
“Could it be that I had been misinformed; that the ceremony was adjourned to another time, or was to be carried out elsewhere? No, a distant murmur of gabbling voices was heard approaching nearer and nearer, till, passing the corner house on my left, I saw a group of negroes—an indiscriminate crowd of all ages and both sexes—so huddled together that no person whom I could particularly distinguish as either an executioner or a culprit was visible among them. But above their clattering talk came the sound of a clanking chain that made one shudder.
“They stopped in the middle of the square opposite the Ju-ju house, and ceased talking. One commanding voice uttered a single word, and down they sat upon the grass, forming a circle round two figures, standing upright in the centre—the executioner and the man about to be killed. The former was remarkable only by the black skull-cap which he had on him, and by a common cutlass which he held in his hand. The latter had chains round his neck, his wrists, and his ankles. There was no sign of fear or cowardice about him—no seeming consciousness of the dreadful fate before him—no evidence even upon his face of that dogged stubbornness which is said to be exhibited by some persons about to undergo an ignominious death. Save that he stood upright one would scarcely have known that he was alive. Amongst the spectators, too, there was a silent impassiveness which was appalling. Not a word, nor gesture, nor glance of sympathy, that could make me believe I looked at beings who had a vestige of humanity among them. (See [illustration] on p. 619.)
“As the Ju-ju butcher stepped back and measured his distance to make an effectual swoop at his victim’s neck, the man moved not a muscle, but stood as if he were unconscious—till——
“Chop! The first blow felled him to the ground. The noise of a chopper tailing on meat is familiar to most people. No other sound was here—none from the man; not a whisper nor a murmur from those who were seated about! I was nearly crying out in mental agony, and the sound of that first stroke will haunt my ears to my dying day. How I wished some one to talk or scream, to destroy the impression of that fearful hough, and the still more awful silence that followed it!