The Dahomey Amazons, Part One

Monsieur E. Chaudoin, fool enough to get himself nabbed during the Dahomey war, described them thus:

"There they are, 4,000 warriors, the 4,000 black virgins of Dahomey, the monarch's bodyguard, motionless in their war garments, with gun and knife in hand, ready to leap forward at the master's signal."

Now, they sure could stand motionless, they were damned ready to leap forward at their master's signals, and they were certainly black as sin, but they weren't virgins.

Well . . . not the ones I came across.

I regret to say say, that while most of my speckled career has been of the most upstandingly heroic deeds (and dashing derring-dos,) in my youthful haste to leave England and the greys of Liverpool I signed onto the first ship that would have me.

It was a slaver.

We set sail for Dahomey in the Spring of 1842 under Captain Burgess, one of those handsome, devil-may-care types the gentry always applaud despite - or perhaps because of - their cruelty mixed with a lilting brogue, and I tried to scarfer the minute we made landfall. It wasn't easy - that coast was a sight to see. Lines of naked blacks, only tied lightly around the wrist, yet completely docile. Didn't they know they were being sold into human bondage by their own kind? They simply hung their heads like broken horses.

"Prisoners of war," the mate whispered, half to me, half to the quarterdeck. "And a damn sight better off they'll be on a Virginia plantation than here under King Ghezo."

"Why's that, sir?" says I. He just spat and rubbed it into the planks with his boot before heaving himself up and clenching his jaw to begin overseeing the cargo.

Three lines they made: two lines of these naked prisoners we were to take aboard, and one of what looked like the king's men. Among the scrub and bushes and the few stray palms were onlookers - mostly little naked children - who seemed, even from that distance, to be containing themselves rather well.

For though I didn't understand a lick of the language, and couldn't have heard it clearly if I did, it seemed to all concerned that the king's soldiers were downright ridiculing the slaves - and quite lewdly, I was guessing from the general tone of proceedings. It was here I dived, quite without thinking about it, into the warm coastal waters and swam furiously to shore.

I mentioned most of this in the account of my youthful travels, The Trials and Trails of a Wandering Youth, available in every civilised bookstore. What I didn't mention was why.

You can call it nobility, that impulse that made me abandon that ship of sin and human misery, and nobility was present. However, squinting to get a look at those huge soldiers, motionless as blackened trees behind the taunted slaves, quashed any nobility instantly. Even if I got safely away from Burgess and the mate, what would those pitch-skinned monsters do to me when I got to shore? If they force their own race into bondage, what'll they do to a pasty-faced outsider?

What tipped the scales? you may well ask.

Squinting harder, I saw those grotesquely large king's men weren't men at all - they were women.

"Well," thinks I, "how much harm can a double column of savage frails do?"

Like I said, I was young.

(To be continued.)

The Inverse of Death

I visited an American acquaintance in Richmond back in '66 - one of the few of my American acquaintances who was still alive then. Out back, his wife kept a greenhouse and grew some of the most vividly coloured flowers I've seen outside the jungle. When it was built, just after the war, glaziers were charging outlandishly ridiculous prices, and you certainly couldn't pay them in Confederate dollars. He found a storehouse full of daguerreotype glass plates - photographs of the war that no one wanted to be reminded of. He build his greenhouse with these plates - images of death in negative. There was something about that idea - the sun slowly fading those bodies of boys in ditches and trenches and filtering through to hothouse flowers - that has always stuck with me. It's poetic, I guess, if you go for that sort of thing.

Not sure I would wear one of those flowers, though.

Emperor of these United States

Joshua Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico; certifiable nut, civic genius, bane of shoddily-dressed coppers and friend to fluffy animals. Most notably though, the only man I've met who is more insanely sane than Prof. Teive himself. Those two used to infuriate each other to the point of . . . well, I'd say 'madness' but both of them left that mark far behind. They used to stay up for days in fiercely competitive games of oneupmanship, each trying to better the other in sheer eccentricity. It was after one of these marathon sessions that Joshua pronounced himself Emperor. I ain't saying there's a connection, but it wasn't the strangest thing I've seen. Why, one morning while we were in San Fransisco hiding out from Transylvanian nobility, that fat braggart Levi Strauss opened his store to find it filled to the ceiling with long grain rice and Teive reclining on it, naked to the world save for a hayseed in his teeth and copper rivets placed strategically over his nipples.

To save a stint in a Californian prison - a fate to which Teive would be particularly ill-suited - I agreed to wear Strauss' new hard-wearing work trousers and had to promise to mention them to Lord Halifax, then Admiral of the fleet, as a possible uniform addition for the tars. I did, eventually, but the old ponce was too busy slurping his wife's tea to take much notice.

Nicotine and Courage

I watched most of the battle of Isandlwhana from, admittedly, a bit of a distance (hell, I was 53 by then and quite comfortable at Staff Headquarters, though still dashing in blue serge,) but I daresay the deaths of Lieutenants Melville and Coghill looked nothing like this. Still, I suppose they've got to sell cigarettes somehow.