THE GABON CLIFF.
A sad series of barbarities, suffering, danger, and death make up the
remainder of my story.
We were in the hands of a tribe addicted to fetishism of the lowest
kind. Worse than the ferocious Bisagos, who pay divine homage to a
dunghill cock, or the people of Benin, who worship their own shadows,
they adored the devil and all snakes, from the little adder to the
great cobra-capello, and maintained temples and priests in their
honour; remaining, in this age of steam, gas, and electricity, as
ignorant as the people mentioned by Ælian, who worshipped flies, and
offered up full-fed oxen on their shrines!
Amid a yelling horde, who, by their menacing tones, seemed full of
animosity, and no doubt were pouring upon us their whole vocabulary
of abuse, though we understood it not, we were led up the steep rough
slope of a mountain, which rose at a very sharp angle to a great
height. The side on which we ascended was covered with loose stones,
amid which the wild coffee and tobacco plants, with innumerable
thorny trees--the _persea_ of Theophrastus--grew in tangled masses,
with serrated grass, having blades as sharp as knives, with many a
nameless bramble that tore our tender skins, while gnats came upon us
in swarms, and well-nigh drove us mad; and all this we endured, while
the well-armed crew of the _Princess_, in ignorance of our fate, were
within a few miles of us!
On reaching what we supposed to be the summit of a mountain, we found
ourselves upon a green plateau that terminated abruptly in a
precipitous cliff nearly four hundred feet in height, and overhanging
some rocky shelves, which sloped down to the bed of the Gabon River.
Here the King dismounted from his dromedary, and squatted his sable
person on a piece of grass matting under the royal umbrella, while
several of his chief men seated themselves at a respectful distance,
after knocking their woolly heads upon the earth, in token of their
slavish submission.
From the brow of this cliff we could see our ship at anchor in the
estuary, but alas! far beyond the reach of signals. We could also
see the little green Pongos, which stud the bay formed by the great
sweep of the Gabon.
Afar off on the other hand towards the east, we could discern where,
between groves of strange trees--the plantain, banana, and the
baobab--with many a giant plant and mighty flower upon its shores,
the great river of Guinea, the Rio Gabon, rolled from its distant
source, in the unexplored land of Ungobai--a stream so broad and deep
that a sloop of war has ascended it for more than seventy miles.
Transparent though the air was around us, a hot sunny haze shrouded
those green forests through which the Gabon came rolling like a
mighty flood of gold towards the west--rolling through a vast plain,
covered by a leafy wilderness, where the lordly lion with his shaggy
mane, the cruel panther with his stealthy step, and the ponderous
elephant, roved in herds; and amid the luxuriant flowers and lovely
fertility of which, the scaly cobra-capello, and a hundred kinds of
dreadful reptiles, with tongues that teemed with poison, lurked;
where every fruit and herb were gigantic in proportion to the mighty
continent which produced them; where the crocodile squattered in the
green miasmatic slime, and the hippopotami, huge, misshapen, and
pre-Adamite in form, swam like the great tusky walrus of the icy
regions I had left so recently.
All these natural wonders were contained in the vast plain at our
feet--a plain that seemed to vibrate under the cloudless glare of the
burning sun; for the heat at noon must have been somewhere about 107°
in the shade, and our tender skins were blistering under it.
But the thoughts this scene inspired for a moment were soon diverted
from it, by the terrors about to be enacted there.
A hideous old negro, whose barbaric ornaments announced his rank and
character as a _fetisher_, proceeded to examine, with gipsy-like
care, the various lines on the palms of our hands.
What he affected to gather therefrom we could not divine, but the
lines proved fatal to three of our companions, whom, with yells of
satisfaction, he thrust aside from the rest, and the work of torture
and death at once began by order of the King.
Three strong and handsome young seamen had their hands tied behind
them by a thick thong.
To this a rope was attached; after this they were thrust over the
cliff, and a piercing cry, which curdled the blood in our hearts,
burst from each, when, by the violence of the jerk and their own
weight, their arms were torn round and upward, and dislocated in the
shoulder socket.
In this horrible situation they swung at the extremity of the
suspending lines, which were made fast to the roots of a palm-tree;
and there with a pendulous motion, they swayed to and fro in mid-air,
over the sharp edge of that impending cliff, with the rocky bank of
the Gabon four hundred feet below.
Need I say their shrieks and cries for pity were piercing and
unheeded?
Unable to yield them the slightest assistance, we gazed in speechless
horror; while, as their strength waned, their sad moans arose from
time to time to the plateau on which we stood.
The hungry cormorants, in anticipation of their coming repast, came
out of their holes in the cliff, and with flapping wings, wheeled and
swooped up and down about them.
To protract the mental and bodily agony endured by these poor
fellows, they were permitted to hang thus for nearly half an hour,
when the King gave a signal, and a score of tum-tums, or drums, were
beaten. On this, the cords were parted by three blows of a sharp
hatchet, then the bodies of our companions fell whizzing through the
air, and vanished from sight far down below, where no doubt the river
crocodiles, the greedy cormorants, and the wild ducks would soon rend
their poor corses asunder.
So perished these unfortunates!
We looked into each other's haggard eyes with blank dismay; and it
may readily be supposed that such an episode made us still more
spiritless and timid.
"Oh, my wife! my poor wife!" exclaimed the unfortunate Baylis from
time to time. "Death is but the birthday of _another_ life, the
parsons tell us; but I think with horror of her fate among such
cowardly dogs as these. God help her! God help her!"
A series of prolonged and exulting yells now announced that our
captors conceived they had appeased the spirit of the fetisher whom
the Yankees had slain.
"Let them die! let them die!" (Baylis told me were their shouts;)
"they are but white dogs who worship neither the sun nor moon, nor
the big snake that lives in the wood."
There were now but six of us remaining, and our fate was soon
decided. The King selected Hartly and Baylis as slaves for himself,
assigning the four others to different chief men of his town or
territory.
"My poor friend," said Hartly, "this is from bad to worse! Why did
we not perish with the _Leda_? We shall never weather these fellows,
I fear!"
I fell to the lot of the savage with the coin at his neck, a
personage whom they named Amoo--the same supple fellow who had first
pounced upon me when we landed in that fiendish country.
As we were separated, Hartly and I had only time to exchange a
farewell glance. My hands were still secured by the thong, which was
tied so tightly that the flesh of my wrists was becoming blue, livid,
and swollen almost to bursting, so my aching arms were powerless. By
blows with the shaft of his asseguy, Amoo drove me down the hill, and
conducted me to his wigwam, when the tribe separated, and save on one
occasion I never again saw any of my poor companions in misfortune;
though I afterwards learned the miserable fate of Captain Baylis and
his wife.