A Whidah man, after
losing all his money and merchandise, would play for his wife and
children, and finally for himself. A slave-trader was always ready to
purchase him and his interesting family from the successful gamester,
who, in turn, often took passage in the same vessel. In this way Whidah
learned to procure slaves for itself, who could be gambled away more
conveniently: the markets exposed for sale monthly one thousand
human beings, taken from the inferior tribes of the coast. The whole
administration of justice of these superior tribes was overthrown by the
advent of the European, who taught them to punish theft, adultery, and
other crimes by putting up the criminal for sale.
The Whidah people were Fetich-worshippers; so were the inhabitants
of Benin. But the latter had the singularity of refusing to sell a
criminal, adjudged to slavery, to the foreign slave-traders, unless
it was a woman. They procured, however, a great many slaves from the
interior for the Portuguese and French. The Benin people dealt in magic
and the ordeal; they believed in apparitions, and filled up their cabins
with idols to such an extent as nearly to eject the family.
The slaves of the river Calabar and the Gaboon were drawn from very
inferior races, who lived in a state of mutual warfare for the purpose
of furnishing each other to the trader. They kidnapped men in the
interior, and their expeditions sometimes went so far that the exhausted
victims occasioned the slaver a loss of sixty per cent, upon his voyage.
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