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"Straight across, and into the barracoon itself," I panted, making a great show of hurry and excitement; and the Frenchmen streamed through the gate like a flock of sheep. As the last man entered, I flung the gate to, dropped the bar into its place, and blew a piercing blast on a whistle which I carried.
See, see, too, we have work here," As he spoke, flames burst forth out of the barracoon, part of which had been blown up by the mine. The seamen who could stand, wounded or not, rushed forward, led by their officers, to help the miserable slaves. They hacked away desperately to get them free of their manacles, trying to cut through the solid iron or the beams to which the chains were secured.
Moreover, the so- called town of King Olomba consisted only of about fifty miserable native huts in the very last stage of sordidness and dilapidation; and there was no sign that a slave barracoon had ever existed near the place. The captain stared across the water as though he found it quite impossible to believe his eyes.
The name is a corruption of "barracoon;" in the palmy days of the trade slave-pens occupied the ground now covered by the chapel, the schoolroom, and the dwelling-house, and extended over the site of the factory to the river-bank. The place is well chosen. Immediately beyond the shore the land swells up to a little rounded hill, clean and grassy like that about Sanga-Tanga.
Then, having got out of the old boy all the information that we could extract which, when we came to analyse it, amounted to just nothing we carefully searched the bush in the neighbourhood of the town, to see if we could discover anything in the nature of a barracoon, but found no trace whatever of any such thing.
He was now a prisoner, and thrust into a suffocating barracoon, herded with the foulest of mankind, with all imaginable depths of blasphemy and indecency sounded hourly in his sight and hearing he lost his self-respect, and became what his gaolers took him to be a wild beast to be locked under bolts and bars, lest he should break out and tear them.
He would bring with him his picked bodyguard, and his following of wives and women; for the visit to the slave-ship, with her cargo of strong waters, was the signal for a series of coarse festivities on the grandest scale. At all other times of the year the factory would be deserted, its huts uninhabited by man, and its barracoon empty.
I assure you I have not the remotest intention of detaining you there." Favart turned and said a word to his men, and the whole party then wheeled and shambled away across the compound and into the open door of the barracoon, which was immediately shut and locked upon them.
And yet, perhaps not so very difficult either; because if the fellows who gave Captain Harrison the information upon which he acted happened to have a grudge against the owners of that factory they would naturally be more than glad if, while groping about in search of the imaginary slavers and barracoon, we should stumble upon the real thing and destroy it.
But why here particularly? For if my theory be correct that the supposed decoy schooner actually sailed out of this river with a full cargo of black ivory, there must certainly be a barracoon somewhere close at hand from which she drew her supplies; and the people who planned the destruction of the sloop could scarcely have been so short-sighted as to have overlooked the fact that such a happening would leave us here stranded in close proximity to a slave factory which, presumably, they would be most anxious should remain undiscovered by us.
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