It was not comfortable, so we were not sorry to be once more upon the road. We arrived at Oratava, and found it delightful. In our days (1863) there were no hotels; but we were able to hire a room, the size of a riding-school, in a private house on the Square. One side was our bedroom, one corner our dressing-room, one our drawing-room and dining-room, and the middle our study.
Whilst here (March, 1863) we made a delightful excursion up the Peak of Teneriffe. We were out two days and one night. The Peak is 12,198 feet above sea-level. We bivouacked in the snow at 9600 feet, and slept well. Temp., 16°. Around us were no end of little spirts of steam; we counted thirty-five on the final cone. The view from the top, as the dawn broke, was glorious. The horses slept lower down, further ascent being too steep, and the most distressing thing was that they could have no water. The mules could eat snow, but they could not; and coming into the town, they flew at everybody with water-jars on their heads. At last they heard the trickling of the stream near the little town, and they bolted at full gallop. We drew rein, jumped down, and loosened their girths, and let them drink. The only peculiarity of our journey was that it was the first performed in winter, and therefore people were anxious about us.
The women of Teneriffe were the most beautiful I have ever seen—a cross between Spanish and Irish, who were shipwrecked here in old times. I used to stop and stare at them until they used to say, "What are you staring at?" and I would answer, "At you, because you are so pretty;" and they used to laugh with delight, and show the most lovely teeth. I allude to the peasant women, whose Spanish is very pretty, but not quite Castilian. Here I wrote my first book on Madeira and Teneriffe; but my husband would not let me print it, because he did not think it was up to the mark. He thought I must study and copy many more years before I tried authorship. And he was right, both in this and not letting me share with him the climate of West Africa. But I thought both very hard at the time.
The time came when he had to go back to his post, but I was not allowed to sleep at Fernando Po. I thought it dreadfully hard, and cried and begged, but he was immovable; and he was right. So I turned back again with a heavy heart, and had a passage back, if not quite as bad, very nearly as bad, viâ Teneriffe and Madeira. Being alone, I had gone into the ladies' cabin—a very small hole with four berths, and what is called by courtesy a sofa; but there were eight of us packed in it. It was pitch dark; the porthole being closed on account of the weather, the effluvia was disgusting. I got on a dressing-gown, and crawled out to a stack of arms, which I fondly embraced, to keep myself from rolling overboard, where I was found by one of the officers, who ran off to the Captain; he found there was an empty deck cabin, which they immediately put me into, and in a few hours, having got rid of the noxious vapours, I quite recovered. I again passed a long and dreary time, during which he kept me either with my parents well at work, or at sea coming out and going back, with visits to Madeira and Teneriffe. I had one very anxious time, inasmuch as he was sent as her Majesty's Commissioner to the King of Dahomè, in those days by no means a safe or easy thing.
Dahomè.
"Beautiful feet are those that go
On kindly ministry to and fro—
Down lowliest ways if God wills so.
"Beautiful life is that whose span
Is spent in duty to God and man,
Forgetting 'self' in all that it can.
"Beautiful calm when the course is run,
Beautiful twilight at set of sun—
Beautiful death with a life well done."
Richard sent as H.M.'s Commissioner to Dahomè.
Richard, being British Consul for Fernando Po, went to visit Agbome, the capital of the kingdom of Dahomè. Lord Russell, hearing of this, gave him instructions to proceed as her Majesty's Commissioner, on a friendly mission to King Gelele, to impress upon the King the importance the British Government attached to the cessation of the slave-trade, and to endeavour by every possible means to induce him to cease to continue the Dahoman customs. Now the Dahoman customs, as all know, meant the cutting of the throats of prisoners of war, and, in old days, making a little lake of blood on which to sail a boat. Not only this, cruelty was the rule of every day. Throats cut, to send a message to the king's father in the other world; women cut open alive in a state of pregnancy to see what it was like; animals tied up in every sort of horrible position. He writes—
"There is apparently in this people a physical delight in cruelty to beasts as well as to men. The sight of suffering seems to bring them enjoyment, without which the world is tame. Probably the wholesale murderers and torturers of history, from Phalaris and Nero downwards, took an animal and sensual pleasure—all the passions are sisters—in the look of blood, and in the inspection of mortal agonies. I can see no other explanation of the phenomena which meets my eye in Africa. In almost all the towns on the Oil Rivers, you see dead or dying animals fastened in some agonizing position. Poultry is most common, because cheapest—eggs and milk are juju to slaves here—they are tied by the legs, head downwards, or lashed round the body to a stake or a tree, where they remain till they fall in fragments. If a man be unwell he hangs a live chicken round his throat, expecting that its pain will abstract from his sufferings. Goats are lashed head downwards tightly to wooden pillars, and are allowed to die a lingering death. Even the harmless tortoise cannot escape impalement. Blood seems to be the favourite ornament for a man's face, as pattern-painting with some dark colour, like indigo, is the proper decoration for a woman. At funerals, numbers of goats and poultry are sacrificed for the benefit of the deceased, and the corpse is sprinkled with the warm blood. The headless trunks are laid upon the body, and if the fowls flap their wings, which they will do for some seconds after decapitation, it is a good omen for the dead man.
"When male prisoners of war are taken they are brought home for sacrifice and food, whilst their infants and children are sometimes supported by the middle, from poles planted in the canoe. The priest decapitates the men—for ordinary executions each Chief has his own headsman—and no one doubts that the bodies are eaten. Mr. Smith and Dr. Hutchinson both aver that they witnessed actual cases. The former declares that, when old Pepple, father of the present King, took captive King Amakree, of New Calabar, he gave a large feast to the European slave-traders on the river. All was on a grand scale. But the reader might perhaps find some difficulty in guessing the name of the dish placed before his Majesty at the head of the table. It was the bloody heart of the King of Calabar, just as it had been torn from the body. He took it in his hand and devoured it with the greatest apparent gusto, remarking, 'This is the way I serve my enemies!'
"Shortly after my first visit, five prisoners of war were brought in from the eastern country. I saw in the juju-house their skulls, which were suspiciously white and clean, as if boiled, and not a white man doubted that they had been eaten. The fact is, that they cannot afford to reject any kind of provisions."