Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/60

54 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, Anamabae and Ambriz, the Congo and St. Paul de Loango, are all familiar names to the student of slave-coast literature." This was the field of operations on the African side, — a hot torrid sea; a practically unindented coast-line, washed by a most dangerous surf; an atmosphere reeking with disease; a dense, miry jungle and forest on landing, the very air of which was like breathing death itself; dangers from ferocious beasts and venomous reptiles, from hostile natives, in fact everything that places the life of man under such conditions and circumstances in jeopardy, while, beyond it all, lay the land of the vast unknown. More or less near in this latter lived the various races and tribes of black people, that furnished the slaves, the relatives and descendants of which are the close blood-relations of the negro stock, now commonly designated as the American negroes.

They were, and are still, the most savage, supersti- tious, and cannibalistic people on the face of the earth. In their supernatural religion of fetishism they see their world peopled with evil and malevolent spirits, at a constant war with nature and with themselves. Lightning, thunder, rain, reptiles, witches, beasts and birds of prey, the cowards and the cunning among their own or other races, were one and all under the con- trol of malignant and antagonistic spirits. Hundreds of negroes in the southern States of North America, still believe in such things, and it is perfectly natural that they should, for, comparatively speaking, it is not