r a time, a body correspondent to the voodoos,
or wizards, of our Gulf States. With hideous incantations, with mad
dances, with obscene songs, with the slaughter of animals, with oaths
on an altar and crucifix, they invoked illness, ruin, and death on
their enemies. In time they gained accessions to their fraternity
from Spanish residents,--thieves, vagrants, deserters from the army,
the half-witted and wrong-hearted outcasts from the towns,--and the
fantastic ceremonies of the jungle came to mean something more to the
purpose of mischief, for the newer Nanigos had more skill and courage
than the slaves, and were familiar with more sins. To enter this
order it was required of the candidate that he steal a cock, kill it,
and drink the warm blood. A darker tale is that they were required to
drink human blood. In Havana this part of the initiation was performed
on the Campo Marti. The man's right nostril was pierced, and a skull
and crossbones branded on his chest. It was then expected of him
that within fifteen days he would kill an official or a policeman,
a white, black, or yellow marble, drawn by chance from a globe,
deciding whether he was to slay a white man, negro, or mulatto. When
he had, by this crime, attained to full membership, a little shield
was given to him which he might wear beneath his coat, and which was
decorated with the device of a skull and bones. For every murder he
committed a red stitch was put in at the edge of the skull. Once
a month, in the dark of the moon, the Nanigos paraded the streets
of the towns, their naked forms painted fantastically, their faces
ghastly with flour, tramping and leaping to the thud of drums and
clash of cymbals, yelling defiance to the military, brandishing knives
and firing pistols. It was a kind of thing that in an American city
could have happened for one consecutive time, but no more. In Havana
the Spaniards were terrorized. The police refused to make arrests,
lest they should fall victims to the outlaws. One judge who refused
to liberate an assassin was slain in his own house by his servant.

As a partial revenge on the Cubans for wishing liberty the Spanish
captains-general have at times pardoned some hundreds of these rascals
and set them free to prey on the people; while, in retaliation, the
insurgents adopted some of the methods of the Nanigos and carried on
a guerilla warfare that neither troops nor trochas could abate. Many
are these more or less bold spirit