Widah had been, and still was, a very important slave station. France, England, and Portugal had in former days possessed forts there, and had successively abandoned them. The Portuguese, Spanish, and Brazilian factories alone remained in possession of the trade in that country. They sold European goods to the King of Dahomey, taking slaves, of whom they had formerly exported large numbers, in exchange, and this was a source of great riches. But at the time I speak of, with the British cruisers about, hardly one slaver got through out of every ten. The King of Dahomey had a glut of slaves on his hands, and cleared them off by massacring them as human sacrifices at idol feasts. One Frenchman, M. Provencal, of the firm of Regis, at Marseilles, had lately rehoisted the national colours at the French fort, rebuilt the dwellings, and set to work to do legitimate trade, offering his goods to the King of Dahomey, and taking nothing in exchange but palm-oil and similar produce. If the slave trade is put down—and when I was on that coast its days seemed already numbered—that enterprising and plucky Frenchman will have done more to civilise those countries than all the more violent measures have accomplished. I was very glad to notice his action, and gave him the heartiest encouragement to persevere in it. The courtyard of the station was already full of casks of palm-oil, which augured well.
Immediately on my arrival I received a visit from the Avogal, the King of Dahomey's governor at Widah, a big healthy-looking negro, with whom the only conversation I had was of the most commonplace description. He was accompanied by two other blacks, with intelligent faces and sharp eyes, who sat on each side of him without speaking a word, and departed equally silently. "Those are the censors," said M. Provencal. "Each of the King's officials is always attended in that fashion to report all he says and does. If the King should be dissatisfied with him he has his head cut off." If this habit was universal there would be fewer office seekers. This king ruled after the antique pattern. He had kept all his seignorial rights. If any of his subjects married a wife the lady had first to be presented to him, and if he liked her he kept her. His authority was unlimited in fact; nevertheless, powerful though he might be, he was likely to find it hard to change his subjects from slave-hunters into oil growers.
After the Avogal's visit I went to pay one in my turn to a strange individual, more of a king in Widah than the King of Dahomey himself, who could not do without him,—for he supplied him with guns and gunpowder for his wars, and brandy wherewith to intoxicate his Amazons. This personage, a Brazilian of the name of Don Francisco de Souza, but known invariably as Cha-Cha, had been settled at Widah for forty-three years. He was a veteran slaver, from whom the British had captured thirty-four ships, two of them quite recently. A little old man, with quick eyes and an expressive countenance, he was credited with having two thousand slaves in his barracoons, and with being the father of eighty male children—the girls had never been thought worth reckoning up. All his sons had been properly brought up. I saw them walking about in all directions, uniformly dressed in white suits, and wearing Panama hats. Most of them were very handsome mulattoes.
The state of the surf, which was impassable, prevented me from getting back on board, so it was settled that I should dine with Cha-Cha, and sleep at the French fort, where I installed myself in the former quarters of the governor, which I shared with M. Provencal. Rather a comical adventure befell me there. A very aged negro, formerly gatekeeper of the fort, when M. Dagneau commanded it for the King of France, had been to pay his respects to me in the morning, and I had caused him to be given a present for himself and his family in the shape of a demijohn of brandy, which they first danced round and then carried off, with great rejoicings. Well, the enthusiasm increased in measure as the contents of the demijohn disappeared, and towards evening the courtyard within the fort was invaded, to a great beating of tomtoms and clucking of women's tongues, by a huge crowd of Dahomeyan negroes, preceded by a sort of corps de ballet of young negresses, wriggling themselves about in every conceivable manner. At their head marched the ci-devant porter in a great state of excitement. He began a fresh harangue in negro French.
"Croire Anglais tues tous Francais. Voir Francais. Trouver pere. Contents, tous contents. Envoie commandant a nous. Pitit-Roi. Contents, tous contents. Tous femmes, tous filles a toi, tous contents!" "Think English killed all French. See Frenchman. Find father. Glad, all glad. Sent captain to us. Little king. Glad, all glad. All women, all girls for you. All glad!" And the young ladies smiled still broader, and contorted their bodies still more violently, while the tomtoms crashed louder than ever. It was clear the crowd expected something, and as it did not see any sign of what it desired, the old negro became yet more explicit both in speech and gesture. The populace actually expected me to provide them with a scion of the royal race! And the commander of the Favorite, Larrieu, flew at me instantly. "Come, Monseigneur," he cried, "here's a chance of distinguishing yourself. Noblesse oblige!"
"My dear fellow," I replied, "I leave you to represent me," and I beat an ignominious retreat, which the crowd did not misunderstand, to judge by the grunts of disappointment I overheard.
That night I dined with Cha-Cha off silver plate, under the light shed by church candelabra and candlesticks; and the toasts of the King and Queen, and Prosperity to France, were each saluted by twenty-one guns, for Cha-Cha's factory and harem, in which he was said to keep a thousand women, formed a real fortress, bristling with cannon, and with the additional natural defence of the lagoon before it. Most of Cha-Cha's children were present at the dinner, and several captains of slave ships, brimful of stories of their adventures. Cha-Cha made me a present of a box of Havanas, the like of which the King of all the Spains had never smoked. I handed it over to Larrieu, and the next day I returned on board my ship, not without having one or two encounters.
The first of these was with the freshly-landed crews of the slavers which had been captured the week before, about fifty determined-looking men of all nationalities, who stopped me and requested in the most arrogant manner to be taken to some port where they might reengage—an impossible thing for me to do.
The second encounter was more painful. A crowd of lame or sickly slaves escaped from the barracoons and threw themselves at my feet, clinging to my clothes, wailing and beseeching me to buy them. The poor wretches, who had no market value, and whom therefore the King did not care to feed, expected to be sent shortly to Abomey for human sacrifices. There were hundreds of them—a most distressing sight.
After Widah our cruise took on a different aspect. We had come to that part of the coast called the Bights, consisting of the Gulfs of Biafra and Benin, between which lies the huge Niger Delta. The weather, which continued as scorching as ever, became excessively oppressive. The sky was always dark and the rain never ceased. Sometimes a rift was seen in the clouds in the distance, it would rapidly increase in size, taking a funnel shape, and then a tornado would burst, like a tempest in miniature, lasting only three or four hours, but of extraordinary violence. During one of these the Belle-Poule had to scud along under bare poles at the rate of twelve knots an hour. The weather was excessively unhealthy, but in the whole course of this long cruise I never lost but one man, who was carried off by a violent inflammation of the liver. I attribute this good fortune in the first place to the undoubted cleverness of our surgeon-major, Dr. Loze, whose whole career had been spent in tropical waters. His theory was that quinine was only absolutely efficacious if administered at a very fleeting moment in the course of the fever, between the hot and cold fits, and he always sat up with his patients himself, so as to catch the favourable opportunity. In the second place we took quite exceptional hygienic precautions, especially against the night damp. The crew wore their winter kit from sunset to sunrise. No man was allowed to lie down on deck during the night watches, especially while the dew was falling. They had to walk up and down the whole time, under an awning, which was always kept up over the deck. In order to carry this out, we never had more than half watches on duty at night. We had to navigate carefully and slowly, being short of hands, but the result was well worth the temporary departure from the usual regulations for life on board a ship of war.