Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/73

 seen, flooded with a dreamy haze, in the distance. The rivers wind about through uncounted channels in low delta lands covered with masses of mangrove and palm trees, and haunted by poisonous and vicious reptiles. The yellowish sand of the sea and the black washings of the uplands mingle to form low, tawny beaches and dunes where the river currents are beaten back by the ever-present and ever-treacherous surf. Goree and Gambia, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, Bonny and Calabar, Anamaboe and Ambriz, the Congo and St. Paul de Loango, are all familiar names to the student of slavecoast literature.

Here as elsewhere in the primitive life of man the strong dominated the weak—there were tribes that were superior, mentally and physically, to their neighbors, and in every tribe there were men who arose above the masses, while among these stalwarts there was a chief who was in every case a real hero to his people. The sons of the chiefs or kings did, indeed, inherit the commanding positions of their fathers, but only when it was shown in them that the blood had not degenerated. In some tribes there was no inheritance of the chief's office.

It was a superstitious as well as a savage people, believing in the existence of invisible supernatural beings of various kinds, but because of the destructive influence of the unexplainable phenomena of nature round about, they regarded nearly all of these spirits as having malevolent minds. From the lightning's stroke to the insidious spread of a tumor, no ill of life occurred that was not the work of a malignant spirit.