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.)