one,
and with the loss of their horses to boot. They now found to their
cost that they had been cajoled and out-manoeuvred by those fellows
of Boossa and its adjoining state, whom they falsely conceived to be
their dearest and best black friends. They had played with them as if
they were great dolls; they had been driven about like shuttlecocks;
they had been to them first a gazing stock, and afterwards were their
laughing stock, and, perhaps, not unlikely their mockery; they had
been their admiration, their buffoons, their wonder and their scorn,
a by-word and a jest. Else why this double dealing, this deceit,
this chicanery, these hollow professions? "Why," as Richard Lander
says, "did they entrap us in this manner? Why have they led us about
as though we had been blind, only to place us in the very lap of what
they imagine to be danger? For can it be possible that the monarchs
of Wowow and Boossa were ignorant of the state of things here, which
is in their own immediate neighbourhood, and which have continued the
same essentially for these three years? Surely," concludes Lander,
"they have knowingly deceived us."

The Landers were now placed in a most unpleasant predicament; they
could not possibly obtain a canoe according to the promise of the
king of Wowow, and to take those which had been lent them by the
chief of Patashie, appeared such a breach of confidence, that they
could not prevail upon themselves to commit it, but the necessity of
the case pleaded strongly in their favour. They had not the means of
purchasing the canoes of the chief of Patashie, as the king of Wowow
had adroitly managed to exhaust them of nearly all their resources;
but when they began to talk of prosecuting their journey in the
canoes belonging to the chief of Patashie, the canoe men stoutly
resisted their right: fortunately, however, for them, their busy,
restless friend Ducoo interfered on their behalf, and soon silenced
their remarks, by threatening to cut off the head of him who should
presume from that time to set foot in either of the canoes; and in
order to give his menace the greater weight, he stationed two of his
men to guard the forbidden boats till the sun went down, with drawn
swords, and during the greater part of the night, another of his men
paraded up and down the banks of the river near the spot as a watch,
and this man kept up a noise by continually playing on a drum.

The four messengers, who had accompanied them fr