. The Sapies
were sleek pacifists who found too late that the warlike Samboses, who
inhabited the neighboring desert, were not to be denied.

'In the island of Sambula we found almadies or canoas, which are made of
one piece of wood, digged out like a trough, but of a good proportion,
being about eight yards long and one in breadth, having a beak-head and
a stern very proportionably made, and on the outside artificially
carved, and painted red and blue.' Neither _almadie_ nor canoa is, of
course, an African word. One is Arabic for a cradle (_el-mahd_); the
other, from which we get _canoe_, is what the natives told Columbus they
called their dugouts; and dugout canoes are very like primitive cradles.
Thus Sparke was the first man to record in English, from actual
experience, the aboriginal craft whose name, both East and West, was
suggested to primeval man by the idea of his being literally 'rocked in
the cradle of the deep.'

Hawkins did not have it all his own way with the negroes, by whom he
once lost seven of his own men killed and twenty-seven wounded. 'But the
captain in a singular wise manner carried himself with countenance very
cheerful outwardly, although inwardly his heart was broken in pieces for
it; done to this end, that the Portugais, being with him, should not
presume to resist against him.' After losing five more men, who were
eaten by sharks, Hawkins shaped his course westward with a good cargo of
negroes and 'other merchandises.' 'Contrary winds and some tornados
happened to us very ill. But the Almighty God, who never suffereth His
elect to perish, sent us the ordinary Breeze, which never left us till
we came to an island of the Cannibals' (Caribs of Dominica), who, by the
by, had just eaten a shipload of Spaniards.

Hawkins found the Spanish officials determined to make a show of
resisting unauthorized trade. But when 'he prepared 100 men well armed
with bows, arrows, arquebuses, and pikes, with which he marched
townwards,' the officials let the sale of blacks go on. Hawkins was
particularly anxious to get rid of his 'lean negroes,' who might die in
his hands and become a dead loss; so he used the 'gunboat argument' to
good effect. Sparke kept his eyes open for side-shows and was delighted
with the alligators, which he called crocodiles, perhaps for the sake of
the crocodile tears. 'His nature is to cry and sob like a Christian to
provoke his prey to come to him; and thereupon came this proverb, th