has any existence.”  The year 1816 was the Augustan age of outrageous negrophilism and equally extreme anti-Napoleonism.  “If a French general” (Introduction, p. i), “brutally seized the person and papers of a British naval officer, on his return from a voyage of discovery,” who, I would ask, plundered and destroyed the fine botanical collection made at risk of health and life, during fifteen months of hard labour, by the learned Palisot de Beauvois, author of the “Flore d’Oware?” The “Reviewer” of Douville (p. 177) as sensibly declares that cannibalism “has hitherto continually retired before the investigation of sober-minded, enlightened men,” when, after a century or two of intercourse with white traders, it still flourishes on the Bonny and New Calabar Rivers.

We are glad to be rid of the Jagas, a subject which has a small literature of its own; the savage race appeared everywhere like a “deus ex machina,” and it became to Intertropical Africa what the “Lost Tribes” were and even now are in some cases, to Asia and not rarely to Europe.  Even the sensible Mr. Wilson ("West Africa,” p. 238) has “no doubt of the Jagas being the same people with the more modernly discovered Pangwes” (Fans); and this is duly copied by M. du Chaillu (chap. viii.).  M. Valdez (ii. 150) more sensibly records that the first Jaga established in Portuguese territory was called Colaxingo (Kolashingo), and that his descendants were named “Jagas,” like the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Roman Ceesars, the Austrian Kaisers, and the Russian Czars:  he also reminds us (p. 150) that the chief of the Bangalas inhabiting Cassange (= Kasanji) was the Jaga or ruler par excellence.

Early on the morning of September 11, I was aroused by a “bob” in the open before us.  We started up, fearing that some death by accident had taken place:  the occasion proved, on the contrary, to be one of ushering into life.  The women were assembled in a ring round the mother, and each howled with all the might of her lungs, either to keep off some evil spirit or to drown the sufferer’s cries.  In some parts of Africa, the Gold Coast for instance, it is considered infamous for a woman thus to betray her pain, but here we are amongst a softer race.

Chapter XII.

Preparations for the March.

Gidi Mavunga, finding me in his power, began, like a thoroughbred African, to raise obstacles.  We must pass through the lands of two kings, the Mfumo ma Vivi (Bibbie of Tuckey) and the Mfumu Nkulu or Nkuru (Cooloo).  The distance was short, but it would occupy five days, meaning a week.  Before positively promising an escort he said it would be necessary to inspect my outfit; I at once placed it in the old man’s hands, the better to say, “This is not mine, ask Gidi Mavunga for it.”