unnatural and monstrous. It is not to be gainsaid that in Feejee the habit quite exceeded necessary requirements; but, without wishing to deny that fact, there is much, when the question is considered judicially, to palliate the offense in those parts. Until the introduction of pigs, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the only animal indigenous to Feejee and the adjacent islands was a rat. Birds and fish there certainly were, but no other animal, and the turning to profitable account of the body of an enemy slain in battle is, under those circumstances, perhaps very easily understood and condoned with. A friend of the writer's, who settled, very early in the history of that colony, on the banks of the Wai-ni-mala River, has related to him, with graphic simplicity, many deeds of horror that he has witnessed within very recent years; how bacōlo, as human flesh is called there, was sent from one chief to another, much as one gentleman sends game to another in our country; and how the sound of the death-drum—heard only once by the writer, but beaten then for himself—was so frequent in his district as to pass almost unnoticed by him.
The same excuse can not be urged in defense of the inhabitants of the West Coast of Africa, who, with a supply of animal food sufficient for all their wants, still indulge, much more frequently than is credited, in this strange flesh, even in those parts where for more than half a century the elevation and improvement of the native races have been the constant labor of the resident white traders, missionaries, and inhabitants. Hutchinson, who was for many years H. B. M. consul on the Gold Coast, writes in 1861, "People in England would scarcely believe that in these days, while I write, cannibalism is almost as rampant on the West Coast of Africa as it has ever been." He quotes, in support of this statement, from the report of the sixty-eighth anniversary of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connection in that colony: "Mr. Priddy, who is employed by the society, stated that the cruel and barbarous practice of cannibalism was still indulged in during the late war; and that he saw hampers of dried human flesh carried on the backs of men, upon which they intended to feast." Mr. Hutchinson goes on to say that "cannibalism exists in the Oman country, up the Cross River; and I am informed that the Boole tribe, who reside far interior to Corisco Bay, come down the river to get some of the sea-shore-dwelling people to make "chop" of them, because they are reputed to have a saltish, therefore a relishable flavor." This last statement only shows how taste varies in different quarters of the globe, for Feejeeans prefer a brown man to a white one on the very grounds that a white man is saltish, and therefore not so pleasant.
Until Mr. Hutchinson wrote it was not generally credited that the Western Africans were addicted to cannibalism, but his evidence is not to be doubted. "In 1859," he says, "human flesh was exposed as butcher's meat in the market at Duketown, Old Calabar." It almost seems that some religious grounds may actuate them, as the same writer
