the crews.  Some cases there had been in which everybody had died, in others, ships had set sail in despair, without completing their full cargo, and Pepel had triumphed in his bad faith, until a man-of-war came and made him disgorge.  Several times already the authorities oft the French station had had to chastise him, and it was a service to the trade of every nation to go and show him one’s teeth now and again.  This object it was, together with a certain amount of curiosity, which had brought us to the Niger River.

When we got to Pepel’s town we found eight large Liverpool merchantmen, partly dismantled, and covered with roofs made of plantain leaves, surrounded by canoes going incessantly to and from the shore, where hundreds of negroes loaded them with casks of palm-oil.  There was a stir and commercial activity such as I had not yet seen anywhere on that coast.  The whole trade was exclusively English.  To avoid the mortality to their crews, the English captains had their ships dismantled as soon as they got into the river, roofed the decks over, and sent their sailors back to England.  The unloading and loading of the ships were then done by negro labour, as soon as a ship’s cargo was completed, she was manned and sent back to Liverpool with the crew of some new arrival, and so on ad lib.  It was very sensible, very well suited to the circumstances of the case; but to carry out such a plan the commercial houses must have had a great many ships, very large capital, and a spirit of consistency in business affairs no longer existing in our country.  What with our unstable regime, and the invariably provisional conditions under which we live, we could never think of such a continuous struggle.

As soon as we had anchored and were preparing to go ashore, a great uproar attracted my attention, and caused me to hurry out of my cabin on deck.  An unhappy negro who had been bathing close to us, with numerous companions of both sexes, had just been seized and carried off by a shark.  We could still see the eddy above the spot where the monster was devouring him.  It was the second time I had witnessed such a scene.  These horrible creatures are “fetish” at the mouth of the Bonny, where its waters join those of the new Calabar River, and human sacrifices are offered to them.  In other words, on certain days of the year, the people go in procession to the river bar and throw in some wretched children, who have been told they were being taken to a festival.  The sharks have a fine feast, to the joy of the onlookers, and amid much beating of tom-toms.  This Jew-Jew, or shark-worship, is one of the most abominable superstitions I have ever met with.  At Widah the snakes were “fetish.”  Here at Bonny it was the lizards, which is less cruel.  Yet they are hideous enough, those Bonny lizards, huge creatures over a yard or a yard and a half long.  They have temples of their own, where they are fed, and whence they sally out for walks, constantly waving their rose-coloured forked tongues, and walking all sideways, so as not to set their feet on their huge bellies, like great bags, which they drag after them like trawl nets.  One has to go about with lanterns at night, for to step on these “fetish” gentry would excite the population into taking the law into its own hands.