At Ayudah I found the natives addicted to a very grovelling species of idolatry. It was their belief that the Good as well as the Evil spirit existed in living Iguanas. In the home of the manfuca, with whom I dwelt, several of these animals were constantly fed and cherished as dii penates, nor was any one allowed to interfere with their freedom, or to harm them when they grew insufferably offensive. The death of one of these crawling deities is considered a calamity in the household, and grief for the reptile becomes as great as for a departed parent.
Whilst I tarried at Ayudah, an invitation came from the King of Dahomey, soliciting the presence of Cha-cha and his guests at the yearly sacrifice of human beings, whose blood is shed not only to appease an irritated god but to satiate the appetite of departed kings. I regret that I did not accompany the party that was present at this dreadful festival. Cha-cha despatched several of the captains who were waiting cargoes, under the charge of his own interpreters and the royal manfucas; and from one of these eye-witnesses, whose curiosity was painfully satiated, I received a faithful account of the horrid spectacle.
For three days our travellers passed through a populous region, fed with abundant repasts prepared in the native villages by Cha-cha’s cooks, and resting at night in hammocks suspended among the trees. On the fourth day the party reached the great capital of Abomey, to which the king had come for the bloody festival from his residence at Cannah. My friends were comfortably lodged for repose, and next morning presented to the sovereign. He was a well-built negro, dressed in the petticoat-trowsers of a Turk, with yellow morocco boots, while a profusion of silk shawls encircled his shoulders and waist, and a lofty chapeau, with trailing plumes, surmounted his wool. A vast body-guard of female soldiers or amazons, armed with lances and muskets, surrounded his majesty. Presently, the manfucas and interpreters, crawling abjectly on their hands and knees to the royal feet, deposited Cha-cha’s tribute and the white men’s offering. The first consisted of several pieces of crape, silks, and taffeta, with a large pitcher and basin of silver; while the latter was a trifling gift of twenty muskets and one hundred pieces of blue dungeree. The present was gracefully accepted, and the donors welcomed to the sacrifice, which was delayed on account of the scarcity of victims, though orders had been given to storm a neighboring tribe to make up three hundred slaves for the festival. In the mean while, a spacious house, furnished in European style, and altogether better than the ordinary dwellings of Africa, was assigned to the strangers. Liberty was also given them to enter wherever they pleased, and take what they wished, inasmuch as all his subjects, male and female, were slaves whom he placed at the white men’s disposal.
The sixth of May was announced as the beginning of the sacrificial rites, which were to last five days. Early in the morning, two hundred females of the amazonian guard, naked to the waist, but richly ornamented with beads and rings at every joint of their oiled and glistening limbs, appeared in the area before the king’s palace, armed with blunt cutlasses. Very soon the sovereign made his appearance, when the band of warriors began their manœuvres, keeping pace, with rude but not unmartial skill, to the native drum and flute.
A short distance from the palace, within sight of the square, a fort or inclosure, about nine feet high, had been built of adobe, and surrounded by a pile of tall, prickly briers. Within this barrier, secured to stakes, stood fifty captives who were to be immolated at the opening of the festival. When the drill of the amazons and the royal review were over, there was, for a considerable time, perfect silence in the ranks and throughout the vast multitude of spectators. Presently, at a signal from the king, one hundred of the women departed at a run, brandishing their weapons and yelling their war-cry, till, heedless of the thorny barricade, they leaped the walls, lacerating their flesh in crossing the prickly impediment. The delay was short. Fifty of these female demons, with torn limbs and bleeding faces, quickly returned, and offered their howling victims to the king. It was now the duty of this personage to begin the sacrifice with his royal hand. Calling the female whose impetuous daring had led her foremost across the thorns, he took a glittering sword from her grasp, and in an instant the head of the first victim fell to the dust. The weapon was then returned to the woman, who, handing it to the white men, desired them to unite in the brutal deed! The strangers, however, not only refused, but, sick at heart, abandoned the scene of butchery, which lasted, they understood, till noon, when the amazons were dismissed to their barracks, reeking with rum and blood.
I have limited the details of this barbarity to the initial cruelties, leaving the reader’s imagination to fancy the atrocities that followed the second blow. It has always been noticed that the sight of blood, which appals a civilized man, serves to excite and enrage the savage, till his frantic passions induce him to mutilate his victims, even as a tiger becomes furious after it has torn the first wound in its prey. For five days the strangers were doomed to hear the yells of the storming amazons as they assailed the fort for fresh victims. On the sixth the sacrifice was over:—the divinity was appeased, and quiet reigned again in the streets of Abomey.
Our travellers were naturally anxious to quit a court where such abominations were regarded as national and religious duties; but before they departed, his majesty proposed to accord them a parting interview. He received the strangers with ceremonious politeness, and called their attention to the throne or royal seat upon which he had coiled his limbs. The chair is said to have been an heir-loom of at least twenty generations. Each leg of the article rests on the skull of some native king or chief, and such is the fanatical respect for the brutal usages of antiquity, that every three years the people of Dahomey are obliged to renew the steadiness of the stool by the fresh skulls of some noted princes!
I was not long enough at Ayudah to observe the manners and customs of the natives with much care, still, as well as I now remember, there was great similarity to the habits of other tribes. The male lords it over the weaker sex, and as a man is valued according to the quantity of his wives; polygamy, even among civilized residents, is carried to a greater excess than elsewhere. Female chastity is not insisted on as in the Mandingo and Soosoo districts, but the husband contents himself with the seeming continence of his mistresses. Sixty or seventy miles south of Ayudah, the adulterous wife of a chief is stabbed in the presence of her relations. Here, also, superstition has set up the altar of human sacrifice, but the divinity considers the offering of a single virgin sufficient for all its requirements.
Some years after my visit to Ayudah, it happened that my traffic called me to Lagos at the season of this annual festival, so that I became an unwilling witness of the horrid scene.