It is utterly ignored by the Egyptian
authorities, although well known to be a colony of cut-throats.
Nothing
would be easier than to send a few officers and two hundred men from
Khartoum to form a military government, and thus impede the slave-trade;
but a bribe from the traders to the authorities is sufficient to insure
an uninterrupted asylum for any amount of villany. The camps were full
of slaves, and the Bari natives assured me that there were large depots
of slaves in the interior belonging to the traders that would be marched
to Gondokoro for shipment to the Soudan a few hours after my departure.
I was the great stumbling-block to the trade, and my presence at
Gondokoro was considered as an unwarrantable intrusion upon a locality
sacred to slavery and iniquity. There were about six hundred of the
traders' people at Gondokoro, whose time was passed in drinking,
quarrelling, and ill-treating the slaves. The greater number were in a
constant state of intoxication, and when in such a state, it was their
invariable custom to fire off their guns in the first direction prompted
by their drunken instincts; thus, from morning till night, guns were
popping in all quarters, and the bullets humming through the air
sometimes close to our ears, and on more than one occasion they struck
up the dust at my feet. Nothing was more probable than a ball through
the head by ACCIDENT, which might have had the beneficial effect of
ridding the traders from a spy. A boy was sitting upon the gunwale of
one of the boats, when a bullet suddenly struck him in the head,
shattering the skull to atoms. NO ONE HAD DONE IT. The body fell into
the water, and the fragments of the skull were scattered on the deck.
After a few days' detention at Gondokoro, I saw unmistakeable signs of
discontent among my men, who had evidently been tampered with by the
different traders' parties. One evening several of the most disaffected
came to me with a complaint that they had not enough meat, and that they
must be allowed to make a razzia upon the cattle of the natives to
procure some oxen. This demand being of course refused, they retired,
muttering in an insolent manner their determination of stealing cattle
with or without my permission. I said nothing at the time, but early on
the following morning I ordered the drum to beat, and the men to fall
in. I made them a short address, reminding them of the agreement made at
Khartoum to follow me faithfully, and of the compact that had been
entered into, that they were neither to indulge in slave-hunting nor in
cattle-stealing. The only effect of my address was a great outbreak of
insolence on the part of the ringleader of the previous evening. This
fellow, named Eesur, was an Arab, and his impertinence was so violent,
that I immediately ordered him twenty-five lashes, as an example to the
others.
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