for refusing to be the
executioner in whipping his own mother. This was a refinement in
cruelty on the part of these professedly Christian Portuguese, which our
travellers afterwards learned was by no means uncommon.

We are told by those who know that region well, and whose veracity is
unquestionable, that the Portuguese on the east coast of Africa live in
constant dread of their slaves rising against them. No wonder,
considering the fiendish cruelties to which they subject them! In order
to keep them in subjection they underfeed them, and if any of them
venture to steal cocoa-nuts from the trees the owners thereof are at
liberty to shoot them and throw them into the sea. Slaves being cheap
there, and plentiful, are easily replaced, hence a cruel owner never
hesitates. If a slave is refractory, and flogging only makes him worse,
his master bids the overseer flog him until "he will require no more."
Still further to keep them in subjection, the Portuguese then endeavour
to eradicate from them all sympathy with each other, and all natural
affection, by the following means. If a woman requires to be flogged,
her brother or son is selected to do it. Fathers are made to flog their
daughters, husbands their wives, and, if two young negroes of different
sexes are observed to show any symptoms of growing attachment for each
other, these two are chosen for each other's executioners. [See
_Travels in Eastern Africa_, by Lyons McLeod, Esquire, FRGS, and late
Her Britannic Majesty's Consul at Mozambique, volume one pages 274 to
277, and volume two page 27.]

The poor wretch whom we have just described as having been saved from
death, to which he had been doomed for refusing to become the
executioner of his own mother, was placed as tenderly and comfortably as
circumstances would admit of in the bottom of the canoe, and then our
travellers pushed on with all haste--anxious to pass the town before the
two fugitives could give the alarm.

They were successful in this, probably because the two men may have hid
themselves for some time in the jungle, under the impression that the
exasperated Englishmen might be searching for them on shore.

Giving themselves time only to take a hurried meal in the middle of the
day, our travellers rowed continuously till sunset when, deeming it
probable that pursuit, if undertaken at all, must have been abandoned,
they put ashore on the right bank of the river and encamped.

When the suffe