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Updated: June 15, 2025
They could not believe that simple travelling was my object, and they were shortly convinced that I was intent upon espionage in their nefarious ivory business and slave-hunting. I had heard when at Khartoum that the most advanced trading station was fifteen days' march from Gondokoro.
Thus the greatest slave-trader of the White Nile, who was so closely connected with the Soudan government that he was a tenant who had rented a country WHICH DID NOT BELONG TO EGYPT, now applied to that government for protection against my interference with his murders, kidnapping, and pillaging, which were the accompaniments of his slave-hunting in Central Africa.
The prisoner thus secured, the order was given. The whips were most scientifically applied, rind after the first five dozen, the slave-hunting scoundrel howled most lustily for mercy. How often had he flogged unfortunate slave women to excess, and what murders had that wretch committed, who now howled for mercy!
On arriving at the ship on the 2nd July, we found a despatch from Earl Russell, containing instructions for the withdrawal of the Expedition. The devastation caused by slave-hunting and famine lay all around. The labour had been as completely swept away from the Great Shire Valley, as it had been from the Zambesi, wherever Portuguese intrigue or power extended.
Some authorities, as will appear in the following chapter, would describe it by a less euphonious term; it is now known that slave-hunting goes on in the upper part of the Zambesi basin owned by them. The French settlement at Obock, opposite Perim, and the partition of Somaliland between England and Italy, can also only be named.
Accidentally, a gentleman whom he met on one of his journeys informed him of a young sailor, in whose company he had been about a year before, who had been actually engaged in one of such slave-hunting expeditions. The gentleman did not know his name, and could but indefinitely describe his person.
Considering the utter devastation caused by the slave-hunting, and the secret support given by the Portuguese officials to the slave-traders, notwithstanding the protestations of their government that they wished to put an end to the trade, it was impossible not to agree in the wisdom of this determination.
It was easy to conceive that my mission was regarded as fatal to the interests of the Soudan. Although the actual wording of the contracts was pure, and the lessees bound themselves to abstain from slave-hunting, and to behave in a becoming manner, it was thoroughly understood that they were simply to pay a good round sum per annum punctually, and that no questions would be asked.
I therefore ordered a light thong of leather to be attached to the iron collar worn as an ornament upon his neck, and I trusted him to the surveillance of a couple of soldiers told off as his guard of honour. We marched south for sixteen miles through a fine country of hills and low forest, where the villages of the Madi had been mostly destroyed by the slave-hunting parties of Abou Saood.
I shall do nothing of the kind; for here, to my knowledge, is a contradictory and very significant result. Among the treasures of my harmas-laboratory, I place in the first rank an Ant-hill of Polyergus rufescens, the celebrated Red Ant, the slave-hunting Amazon.
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