Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/671

Rh West Indian Islands are at the present day free from every trace of the cult, the explanation is ready. The English supplied their colonies with slaves from their forts on the Gold Coast, and the great majority, so great as to comprise almost all the slaves imported into the British West Indies, were what were called, in the jargon of the slave trade, Coromantees, a designation which was a corruption of the name of a town called Acromanti, situated some fifteen miles to the east of Cape Coast Castle, and where the first English fort on the Gold Coast was built. These Coromantees, all members of the Tshi-speaking tribes—the Ashantis, Denkeras, Akims, Assins, Fantis, etc.—were noted for their superior physical strength, and for their ferocity and rebellious disposition. Every slave rebellion in the British West Indies, from the first in Jamaica in 1690 to the last in 1831 in the same island, was a rebellion of Coromantees; and their dangerous character was so well known that other nations did not care to purchase them. The Royal African Company had a treaty with Spain by which it undertook to supply the Spanish colonies with Eboe or Ibo slaves from the delta of the Niger, who, though of inferior physique, were preferred on account of their docility; and the French obtained their slaves principally from Whydah, though partly also from Senegal. Hence the great mass of Ardras and Whydahs were shipped to the French West India Islands, and no doubt the snake cult was introduced into Martinique and Guadeloupe as well as into Hayti. All such võdu or "fetich" practices were, however, sternly suppressed by the planters, partly because they themselves feared them and had a superstitious belief in their power for evil, but principally because it was by their means that the more restless and uncontrollable slaves instigated their more docile brethren to rebel. There was the religious element at the bottom of every outbreak, and consequently all võdu practices were forbidden under heavy penalties. But such superstitions die hard; and though we do not now hear of any võdu-worship in Martinique and Guadeloupe, yet it is probable that, if the negroes of those islands had succeeded in achieving their independence, we should find it in as full vigor there as we do now in Hayti.

At the date of the overthrow of Ardra and Whydah, Louisiana was also a French possession, colonized by the French Mississippi Company; so we might reasonably suppose that some Ewe-speaking slaves were introduced there also, though it seems that the colonists obtained a great many from English slavetraders. But in 1809 a large number of French planters with their slaves, who in consequence of the insurrection in Hayti had sought refuge in Cuba, were compelled by the outbreak of war between France and Spain to quit their asylum, and landed in New Orleans. There were about five thousand eight hundred in