burning huts. Later still the band returned, bringing thirty men, women, and children. A small village had been attacked when all its people were asleep. Some were killed and some escaped to the brush, the thirty captives being taken alive and unhurt. These were bound securely, and when day came they were carried down to the agency.
This is one of the mildest stories of a raid known to the history of the trade.
Captain Canot, in describing the work of a raiding party, says:
"In my wanderings in Africa I have often seen the tiger pounce upon its prey, and with instinctive thirst satiate its appetite for blood and abandon the drained corpse; but these African negresses [who were of the raiding party] were neither as decent nor as merciful as the beast of the wilderness. Their malignant pleasure seemed to consist in the invention of tortures that would agonize but not slay. A slow, lingering, tormenting mutilation was practised on the living ... and in every instance the brutality of the women exceeded that of the men. I cannot picture their hellish joy... while the queen of the harpies crept amid the butchery gathering the brains from each severed skull as a bonne bouche for the approaching feast."
As for the defeated negroes who were not killed, they were carried down to the sea and sold. And as time passed the passion for blood grew on the raiders until it was greater than their greed. They tortured to death many whom they might have sold. Before the end of the eighteenth century these raids, called wars by those who owned the slave-ships, were the
