United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The reader who is not acquainted with these slave-raiding habits would be greatly interested in the story of the Amazons. I relinquish it, with much regret: it would take us too far from our subject, namely, the return to the nest. The distance covered by the nymph-stealing column varies: it all depends on whether Black Ants are plentiful in the neighbourhood.
England, herself the mother of free peoples, was stained with the guilt of being one of the first to originate the worst form of slavery that the world has ever seen, the African slave-trade, her great Queen Elizabeth not scorning to enrich her royal coffers out of the profits of slave-raiding expeditions conducted by her sea-captains.
"Now we knew this wretch, for after the Arabs landed at Kilwa, but before actual hostilities broke out between us, he had fallen sick of smallpox and my wife had helped to nurse him. Had it not been for her, indeed, he would have died. However, although the leader of the band, he was not present at the attack, being engaged in some slave-raiding business in the interior.
Yet he knew that, although he had scored a triumph in this fight with the slave-dealer, he had not won in his great campaign. The King was generally kind to Mackay, for he was proud to have so clever a white man in his country. But he could not make up his mind to become a Christian. M'tesa's heart had not really changed. His slave-raiding of other tribes might still go on.
The petty rulers were filled with jealousy of one another and eager always to fall upon their friends, when slave-raiding for a season was unsuccessful. Alec's plan was to join two or three smaller states in an attack upon the most powerful of them all, to crush this completely, and then to take his old allies one by one, if they would not guarantee to give up their raids on peaceful tribes.
A military expedition against two revolted and slave-raiding emirs, holding strong positions on the great river; a few officers borrowed from home to stiffen a local militia; hot fighting against great odds; half a million of men released from a reign of hell; tyranny broken, and the British pax extended over regions a third as large as India smiling prosperity within its pale, bestial devastation and cruelty without these things she knew, or had been able to imagine from the newspapers.
Slave-raiding has been utterly wiped out in all parts of Africa, except in portions of the Sudan and other districts over which white rule has not yet been asserted. The Arabs of the Congo, who went there from East Africa solely that they might grow rich in the slave trade, are now settled quietly on their rice and banana plantations.
The Portuguese and half-breeds here, their vigour unimpaired by a temperate and bracing climate, would sally out to the west and to the south on slave-raiding expeditions, which they conducted with extraordinary ferocity and enterprise.
There the French came into collision with a powerful slave-raiding chief, Samory, whom they worsted in a series of campaigns in the five years following. French energy secured for the Republic the very lands which the great traveller Mungo Park first revealed to the gaze of civilised peoples.
The results achieved may well seem small compared with the magnitude of the purpose, but those who know most about it do not despise them. Slave-raiding and tribal wars have been diminished and some check put on importing arms and spirits. It is not a topic on which it is easy to keep a cheerful mind.
Word Of The Day