Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/279

Rh that no white man had ever been there before him, although the town is situated only sixty miles from Sierra Leone. His appearance, as was to be expected, excited no little astonishment—one woman, in particular, stood fixed like a statue gazing on the party as they "entered the town, and did not stir a muscle till the whole had passed, when she gave a loud halloo of astonishment, and then covered her mouth with both her hands. Of the Timmanees he writes in his journal very unfavourably; he found them depraved, indolent, avaricious, and so deeply sunk in the debasement of the slave traffic, that the very mothers among them raised a clamour against him for refusing to buy their children. He further accuses them of dishonesty and gross indecency, and altogether wonders that a country so near Sierra Leone, should have gained so little by its proximity to a British settlement.

From the country of the Timmanees lieutenant Laing proceeded into that of Kooranko, the first view of which was much more promising he found the first town into which he entered neat and clean, and the inhabitants bearing all the marks of active industry. It was about sunset when he approached it, and we give in his own language a description of the scene. "Some of the people," says he, "had been engaged in preparing the fields for the crops, others were penning up a few cattle, whose sleek sides denoted the richness of their pasturages; the last clink of the blacksmith's hammer was sounding, the weaver was measuring the cloth he had woven during the day, and the guarange, a worker in leather, was tying up his neatly stained pouches, shoes, and knife-sheaths; while the crier at the mosques, with the melancholy call of 'Allah Akbar,' summoned the decorous Moslems to their evening devotions." Such were our traveller's first impressions of the Koorankoes; but their subsequent conduct did not confirm the good opinion he had formed of them.

On approaching the hilly country, lieutenant Laing informs us that nothing could be more beautiful or animating than the scene presented to his view,—well clothed rising grounds, cultivated valleys, and meadows smiling with verdure; the people in the different towns were contented ar.d good-humoured, and, in general, received the stranger with very great kindness. In illustration of this he has given us the burden of the song of one of their minstrels:—"The white man lived on the waters and ate nothing but fish, which made him so thin; but the black men will give him cows and sheep to eat, and milk to drink, and then he will grow fat."

At Komato, the last town of the Koorankoes, on his route, our traveller found a messenger from the king of Soolimana, with horses and carriages to convey him to Falaba, the capital of that nation. Crossing the Rokelle river, about a hundred yards broad, by ropes of twigs suspended from the branches of two immense trees, (a suspension bridge called by the natives Nyankata,) he proceeded to that city; and having been joined by the king's son at the last town upon this side of it, he entered Falaba under a salute of musketry from 2000 men, who were drawn up in the centre of the town to receive him.

Not long after reaching Falaba, lieutenant, now captain Laing (for about this time he was promoted,) was seized with a fever which brought on delirium for several days. While in this state he was cupped by one of the Soolima doctors, nnd that so effectually as to satisfy him that it was the means of saving his life. The operation differed in no respect from ours, except that the skin was scarified by a razor, and the cup was a small calabash gourd.

Our traveller enters, in his journal, into a long detail of the habits and manners of the Soolimas. with which he had made himself fully acquainted during his three months' residence in Falaba. To give even a short abstract of this, would be inconsistent with the limits assigned to this memoir. Suffice it to say,