“The band when it set out from Kirundu numbered 300 fighting men, armed with flint-locks, double-barrelled percussion guns, and a few breech-loaders; their followers, or domestic slaves and women, doubled this force....  Within the enclosure was a series of low sheds extending many lines deep from the immediate edge of the clay bank inland, 100 yards; in length the camp was about 300 yards.  At the landing-place below were 54 long canoes, varying in carrying capacity.  Each might convey from 10 to 100 people....  The first general impressions are that the camp is much too densely peopled for comfort.  There are rows upon rows of dark nakedness, relieved here and there by the white dresses of the captors.  There are lines or groups of naked forms—­upright, standing, or moving about listlessly; naked bodies are stretched under the sheds in all positions; naked legs innumerable are seen in the perspective of prostrate sleepers; there are countless naked children—­many mere infants—­forms of boyhood and girlhood, and occasionally a drove of absolutely naked old women bending under a basket of fuel, or cassava tubers, or bananas, who are driven through the moving groups by two or three musketeers.  On paying more attention to details, I observe that mostly all are fettered; youths with iron rings around their necks, through which a chain, like one of our boat anchor-chains, is rove, securing the captives by twenties.  The children over ten are secured by these copper rings, each ringed leg brought together by the central ring.”

By a careful examination of statistics Mr. Stanley estimates that counting the men killed in the raids and those who perish on the march or are slain because supposed to be worthless, every 5,000 slaves actually sold cost over 30,000 lives.

But there are Arabs and Arabs we are told.  The slave-dealers of East Africa and the barbarous chieftains who push their bloody conquests in Western Soudan are bad enough, it is admitted, but they are “exceptions.”  Yet we insist that they illustrate the very spirit of Mohammed himself, who authorized the taking of prisoners of war as slaves.  Their plea is that they save the souls of those they capture; many of these traders are Mollahs—­Pharisees of the Pharisees.  Canon Taylor, Dr. Blyden, and others have given us glowing accounts of “Arab missionaries going about without purse or scrip, and disseminating their religion by quietly teaching the Koran;” but the venerable Bishop Crowther, who has spent his whole life in that part of Africa where these conquests are supposed to be made, declares that the real vocation of the quiet apostles of the Koran is that of fetish peddlers.[118] If it be objected that this is the biased testimony of a Christian missionary, it may be backed by the explorer Lander, who, in speaking of this same class of men, says:  “These Mollahs procure an easy subsistence by making fetishes or writing charms on bits of wood which are washed off carefully into a basin of water, and drank with