HOW THE CAPTAIN PERISHED.
I have mentioned that the gentle Mrs. Baylis--she who had nursed us
so kindly in our helplessness--had been carried off by the women of
this tribe of devils, who confined her in a wigwam.
On perceiving the whiteness of her skin, and the great length and
softness of her hair, which was of a fair auburn colour, forming thus
a strange contrast to their sooty exteriors, and the short,
poodledog-like tufts of wool with which their own round skulls were
covered, they diligently proceeded to make her as like themselves as
possible.
A species of gum and certain herbs were boiled in an earthen pipkin,
and with this decoction they rubbed her whole face and body, until
they became black as ebony.
They next rooted out the whole of her soft and beautiful hair, making
her perfectly bald. Her head was then smeared thickly with gum, and
coated over with green and crimson parrot's feathers. They then
streaked her breast and shoulders with red and yellow paint. This
process occupied two entire days, during which she remained a passive
victim in their hands, and at the close--when these ladies of the Rio
Serpientes thought they had made the unhappy woman as fiendish in
aspect and as like themselves as possible--they placed a kind of hoe
in her hands and dragged her into a plantation of millet to work with
them; as the naked warriors and lazy husbands of Gabon, like those of
other savage districts, disdainfully leave all manual labour to their
slavish helpmates.
Despair and exhaustion rendered Mrs. Baylis unable to work; so the
negresses beat, scratched, and bit her, till she sank under their
hands at the root of a date-tree, where she lay inert and reckless
alike of life and death; but the horrid hiss of a serpent close by,
aroused her.
So great is the instinctive love of life, that on beholding this
hideous reptile, which was of the venomous kind and some six or eight
feet long, rearing its head to attack her, she uttered a shrill and
piercing cry for aid.
Two white prisoners who had been hewing wood in an adjacent thicket
came forth on hearing this; but the negresses, who laughed and danced
on seeing the poor woman assailed by one of their holy snakes, met
the two men with their hoes in a hostile attitude, and barred their
advance to a rescue: while the white men, conceiving the shrieking
victim to be a mere savage--so darkly was the skin of Mrs. Baylis
dyed by the decoctions of her tormentors--were not over anxious to
interfere.
In one of these white prisoners, worn to a skeleton, haggard in eye,
and covered with sores and bloody bruises, she had nearly as much
difficulty in recognising her husband, the once plump and jolly
captain of the _Princess_, as he had, in tracing in the face of that
dusky and copper-coloured squaw, with her gummed wig of red and green
parrot's feathers, his pretty English wife, with her once snowy skin
and silky auburn hair; but she cried aloud,
"Save me, Baylis--Oh, save me! I am your poor wife, your own Annie!"
The unfortunate Baylis trembled with mingled rage and horror, and
snatching a hoe from a negress rushed upon the poisonous serpent,
which had already bitten its victim thrice, and beat it furiously
upon its flat head and scaly body; but while doing so, the frantic
cries of the negresses, who deemed this an act of sacrilege, brought
to the spot Amoo, with a crowd of savages, one of whom pierced Baylis
through the heart with his asseguy, and mercifully slew him on the
instant.
The negresses then rushed upon his wife, and by repeated blows of
their implements upon her head, face, and bosom, soon ended her
miseries.
On beholding this scene of double barbarity, the seaman who had been
at work with Baylis, and who, like him, was also a mass of sores and
bruises by the ill-usage he had undergone, became filled by a species
of frenzy. Wresting an asseguy from Amoo, he ran three of his
followers through the body in quick succession, and killed, or
mortally wounded them, as all these weapons are poisoned; but he was
soon overpowered by numbers, beaten down, secured, and condemned to
death by tortures, almost too horrible for narration.
His eyes, mouth, and nostrils were forced open and filled with hot
pepper. He was then enclosed in a strong basket of cylindrical form,
full of long sharp thorns, and this was rolled for hours about the
town of wigwams, until he became a shapeless mass of flesh and blood,
which dropped through the wattling of the cage; and during this
dreadful torture, under which he must soon have perished, if he
uttered cries they were unheard, as they were unheeded, for the
whooping, yelling, and beating of tum-tums, might have made one
suppose that Pandemonium had vomited all its denizens on the bank of
the Gabon River.
While this was going on, I was at work among the plants which grew in
a patch of ground adjoining the wigwam of Amoo; but I could in no way
discover _who_ this last victim was. However, as Baylis and Hartly
had been condemned to slavery together, I was full of deep sorrow
lest the sufferer might be my friend.