The sacrifice over, a sortie was ordered. The infuriate and starving savages, roused by the oracle and inflamed by the bloody scene, rushed forth tumultuously. Amarar, armed with the pestle, still warm and reeking with his infant’s blood, was foremost in the onset. The besiegers gave way and fled; the town was re-provisioned; the fortifications of the enemy demolished, and the soothsayer rewarded with a slave for his barbarous prediction!
At another time, Amarar was on the point of attacking a strongly fortified town, when doubts were intimated of success. Again the wizard was consulted, when the mysterious oracle declared that the chief “could not conquer till he returned once more to his mother’s womb!” That night Amarar committed the blackest of incests; but his party was repulsed, and the false prophet stoned to death!
These are faint incidents of a savage drama which lasted several years, until Amarar, in his native town, became the prisoner of Shiakar’s soldiery. Mana, his captor, caused him to be decapitated; and while the blood still streamed from the severed neck, the monster’s head was thrust into the fresh-torn bowels of his mother!
CHAPTER LIII.
The first expedition upon which Don Pedro Blanco despatched me revealed a new phase of Africa to my astonished eyes. I was sent in a small Portuguese schooner to Liberia for tobacco; and here the trader who had never contemplated the negro on the shores of his parent country except as a slave or a catcher of slaves, first beheld the rudiments of an infant state, which in time may become the wedge of Ethiopian civilization. The comfortable government house, neat public warerooms, large emigration home, designed for the accommodation of the houseless; clean and spacious streets, with brick stores and dwellings; the twin churches with their bells and comfortable surroundings; the genial welcome from well dressed negroes; the regular wharves and trim craft on the stocks, and last of all, a visit from a colored collector with a printed bill for twelve dollars “anchor dues,” all convinced me that there was, in truth, something more in these ebony frames than an article of commerce and labor. I paid the bill eagerly,—considering that a document printed in Africa by Negroes, under North American influence, would be a curiosity among the infidels of Gallinas!
My engagements with Blanco had been made on the basis of familiarity with the slave-trade in all its branches, but my independent spirit and impatient temper forbade, from the first, the acceptance of any subordinate position at Gallinas. Accordingly, as soon as I returned from the new Republic, Don Pedro desired me to prepare for the establishment of a branch factory, under my exclusive control, at New Sestros, an independent principality in the hands of a Bassa chief.
I lost no time in setting forth on this career of comparative independence, and landed with the trading cargo provided for me, at the Kroomen’s town, where I thought it best to dwell till a factory could be built.
An African, as well as a white man, must be drilled into the traffic. It is one of those things that do not “come by nature:” yet its mysteries are acquired, like the mysteries of commerce generally, with much more facility by some tribes than others. I found this signally illustrated by the prince and people of New Sestros, and very soon detected their great inferiority to the Soosoos, Mandingoes, and Veys. For a time their conduct was so silly, arrogant, and trifling, that I closed my chests and broke off communication. Besides this, the slaves they offered were of an inferior character and held at exorbitant prices. Still, as I was commanded to purchase rapidly, I managed to collect about seventy-five negroes of medium grades, all of whom I designed sending to Gallinas in the schooner that was tugging at her anchor off the beach.