As a sequel to this, I learned that a fortnight after, another man was killed in his town as a witch.
The question is naturally asked, What is this crime of witchcraft? Those people who do any trading imagine that a witch is able by means of some fell sorcery to possess himself of the spirit of his victim. He can then put the spirit into a tusk of ivory, or among his merchandise, and convey it to the coast, where the white men will buy it. In due course, if not at the time, the ‘witched’ man dies. Then the white man can make him work for him in his country under the sea. They believe that very many of the coast labourers are men thus obtained, and often when they go to trade look anxiously about for dead relatives. Sometimes when we are travelling they look on with wonder and disgust as we open our tinned provisions, ‘calculating’ that that at least must be one of the uses to which we put their dead relatives.
The notion of the land under the sea has its origin in their faculty of observation. They see ships coming in from sea appear, first the mast, then the hull; and thus at a decent distance out, so as not to reveal the trick, we white men emerge from the ocean. Travellers love to enlarge upon the wonders they have seen, and so the story grows, and the people have been brought up in the belief that away under the sea their relatives make cloth, etc., for us white folk.
This is, however, a new idea, comparatively. The old notion still prevails in many parts, that away in some dark forest land departed spirits dwell. The witches, they think, have some interest in sending away their fellows to the spirit land. Perhaps they get pay from the spirits, no one knows or questions why. Who can know a witch’s business but a witch?
Even if a man dies in war, or is taken by a wild beast or crocodile, it is witchcraft. To such an extent is this believed, that people will bathe in streams where crocodiles abound. So long as there are plenty of people