carry off the crew. Some of them have been brought for trial
but no complete case has been made out against them ! ” In
comment upon this account, which is evidently written by
some one well versed in the affair, I will only remark that
sometimes, instead of the three-pronged forks, there are fixed
in the paws of the leopard skin sharp-pointed cutting knives,
the skin being made into a sort of glove into which the
hand of the human leopard fits. In one skin I saw down
south this was most ingeniously done. The knives were
shaped like the leopard’s claws, curved, sharp-pointed, and
with cutting edges underneath, and I am told the American
Mendi Mission, which works in the Sierra Leone districts, have
got a similar skin in their possession. In Calabar and
Libreville, these murders used to be very common right in
close to the white settlements; but in Calabar white jurisdiction
is now too much feared for them to be carried on near it, and
in Libreville the making of the “ Boulevard ” between that
town and Glass has cleared the custom out from its great
haunt along by the swamp path that was formerly there.
But before the existence of the Boulevard, when the narrow
track was intercepted by patches of swamp, and ran between
dense bush, it was notoriously unsafe even for a white man
to go along it after dark. In the districts I know where
human leopardism occurs (from Bonny to Congo Beige) the
victims are killed to provide human flesh for certain secret
societies who eat it as one of their rites. Sometimes it is
used by a man playing a lone hand to kill an enemy.
The human alligator mentioned, is our old friend the witch
crocodile— the spirit of the man in the crocodile. I never
myself came across a case of a man in his corporeal body
swimming about in a crocodile skin, and I doubt whether any
native would chance himself inside a crocodile skin and swim
about in the river among the genuine articles for fear of their
penetrating his disguise mentally and physically. •
In Calabar witch crocodiles are still flourishing. There
is an immense old brute that sporting Vice-Consuls periodically
go after, which is known to contain the spirit of a
Duke Town chief who shall be nameless, because they are
getting on at such a pace just round Duke Town that haply I
might be had up for libel. When I was m Cakbar once
a peculiarly energetic officer had hit that crocodile and the
chief was forthwith laid up by a wound m his leg. He sa
a dog had bit him. They, the chief and the^ crocodile are
quite well again now, and I will say this in favour of that
chief, that nothing on earth would persuade me to believe
that he went fooling about in the Calabar River in his
corporeal body, either in his own skin or a crocodile s.
The introduction of the Fetish Boofima into the cou y
of the Imperi is an interesting point as it. shows thatThese
different tribes have the same big ju-ju. Similar y,
Egbo can go into Okyon, and will be respected in some of
the New Calabar districts, but not at Brass, where the secre
society is a distinct cult. Often a neighbouring district
will send into Calabar, or Brass, where the big ju-ju is, and
ask to have one sent up into their district to
Egbo will occasionally be sent into a district without that
diftrict in the least wanting it ; but, as in the Imperi case,
when it is there it is supreme. But say, for examp , y
were to send Egbo round from Calabar to Cameroon
Cameroon might be barely civil to it, but would « W g
homage, for Cameroon has got no end of a ju-ju of its ow .
It can rise up as high as the Peak, i 3 ) 7 6 o feet. I never saw
the Cameroon ju-ju do this, but I saw it start up from four
feet to quite twelve feet in the twinkling of an eye, and I was
assured that it was only modest reticence on its part that
made it leave the other i 3>748 feet out of the performance.
Cameroon also has its murder societies, but I have never
been resident sufficiently long in Cameroon River to speak
with any authority regarding them, but when I was in there
in May, i89S,the natives of Bell Town were in a stat^ g
anxiety about their children. A week before, two little girls
and a boy belonging to one family had gone down among
a host of other children to the river-beach by Bell Town, to
fill the pots and calabashes for the evening. It was broad
daylight at the time, and the place they went to is not a
lonely place but right on the beach before:tffii town and
olentv of people about in all directions. The children filled