shall swell up and burst. There is no doubt it is a very easy method of carrying on commerce.
In what the silent trade may have originated it is hard to say; but one thing is certain, that the dread and fear of the negroes did not result from the evil effects of the slave trade, as so many of their terrors are said to have done, for we have seen notice of it long before this slave trade arose. Nevertheless, there can be but little doubt that it arose from a sense of personal insecurity, and has fetish in it, the natives holding it safer to leave so dangerous a thing as trafficking with unknown beings—white things that were most likely spirits, with the smell of death on them—in the hands of their gods. In the cases of it that I have seen no doubt it was done mostly for convenience, one person being thereby enabled to have several shops open at but little working expense; but I have seen it employed as a method of trading between tribes at war with each other.[1] We must dismiss, I fear, bashfulness regarding lips as being a real cause; but I will not dismiss the bleeding lips as a mere traveller's tale, because I have seen quite enough to make me understand what those people who told of bleeding thick lips meant; several, not all of my African friends, are a bit thick about the lower lip, and when they have been passing over waterless sun-dried plateaux or bits of desert they are anything but decorative. The lips get swollen and black, and Ca da Mostro does not go too far in his description of what he was told regarding them.
- ↑ Mr. Ling Roth kindly informs me of further instances of this silent trading to be found in Lander's Journal, Lond., 1832, iii. 161–163, and Forbes's Wanderings of a Naturalist, Lond. 1886, where it is cited for the Kubus of Sumatra. He says it also occurs among the Veddahs, and that there is in no case any fetish control.
