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Updated: June 20, 2025
I have lately had a painful lesson in the treachery of Kabba Rega, who, when I had relieved him of his enemies, the slave-traders, immediately turned against ME. These natives might probably do the same. Negroes respect nothing but force; and the force that now exists, if removed, will leave them free to act against the government.
Well I have found out something of this Nest from my servant. Pereira said that it was eight days' journey from your master's settlement, so your mistress has been there some three or four days if she ever reached it. Now, from what I know of the habits of slave-traders on this coast, the dhows will not begin to take in their cargoes for another month, because of the monsoon.
It is said that the slave-traders taught them to lie and steal, and to sell each other, whenever they could not supply a sufficient number of their neighbors, the simple and pastoral Serreres. The Foulahs live upon the elevated plateaus of Senegambia and around the sources of the Rio Grande. The Mandingoes introduced the Koran among them.
Our gunboat, the Sphinx, goes the round of the coast to prevent this traffic in human flesh, and frequently slaves swim out to the British steamer and obtain their liberty. This naturally makes us very unpopular in Sur, where the Jenefa tribe have their head-quarters, the most inveterate slave-traders of Southern Arabia.
And yet from her point of view it was not altogether unreasonable. Her blackest villain and most loathsome agent of the system, Legree, was a native of Vermont. All her wrath falls upon the slave-traders, the auctioneers, the public whippers, and the overseers, and all these persons and classes were detested by the Southerners to the point of loathing, and were social outcasts.
A pernicious climate, warm and damp lands, which engender fevers, barbarous natives, some of whom are still cannibals, a permanent state of war between tribes, the slave-traders' suspicion of every stranger who seeks to discover the secrets of their infamous commerce; such are the difficulties to surmount, the dangers to overcome in this province of Angola, one of the most dangerous of equatorial Africa.
Mohun, who had been engaged on account of his knowledge of the country, had been American Consul at Zanzibar and at Boma, and first left diplomacy to fight the Arab slave-traders in the interior. When someone asked him why he had quit the United States Government service to go on a military mission he said, "I prefer killing Arabs in the interior to killing time at Boma."
I at once perceived that not only was my expedition unpopular, but that it would be seriously opposed by all parties. The troops had been quartered for some months at Khartoum; during this time the officers had been intimate with the principal slave-traders of the country.
Fire! everybody fire!" The rifle and the women, however, were all safe enough, the slave-traders being only too glad to escape alone. Fifty more slaves were freed next day in another village; and, the whole party being stark-naked, cloth enough was left to clothe them, better probably than they had ever been clothed before.
Many a strange sight they saw: vessels bearing slaves, whose sighing might be heard above the sighing of wind and water young men and maidens of Ionia and Achaia, stolen by slave-traders into bondage; now they would touch at the white havens of a peaceful city; and again they would watch a smoke on the sea-line all day, rising black into the heavens; but by nightfall the smoke would change to a great roaring fire from the beacons of a beleaguered island town; the fire would blaze on the masts of the ships of the besiegers, and show blood-red on their sails, and glitter on the gilded shields that lined the bulwarks of their ships.
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