rth and all its enjoyments. When one man has killed another,
a sacrifice is made, as if to lay the spirit of the victim. A sect is
reported to exist who kill men in order to take their hearts and offer
them to the Barimo.

The chieftainship is elective from certain families. Among the Bangalas
of the Cassange valley the chief is chosen from three families in
rotation. A chief's brother inherits in preference to his son. The sons
of a sister belong to her brother; and he often sells his nephews to pay
his debts. By this and other unnatural customs, more than by war, is the
slave-market supplied.

The prejudices in favor of these practices are very deeply rooted in
the native mind. Even at Loanda they retire out of the city in order
to perform their heathenish rites without the cognizance of the
authorities. Their religion, if such it may be called, is one of dread.
Numbers of charms are employed to avert the evils with which they feel
themselves to be encompassed. Occasionally you meet a man, more cautious
or more timid than the rest, with twenty or thirty charms round his
neck. He seems to act upon the principle of Proclus, in his prayer to
all the gods and goddesses: among so many he surely must have the right
one. The disrespect which Europeans pay to the objects of their fear is
to their minds only an evidence of great folly.

While here, I reproduced the last of my lost papers and maps; and
as there is a post twice a month from Loanda, I had the happiness to
receive a packet of the "Times", and, among other news, an account of
the Russian war up to the terrible charge of the light cavalry. The
intense anxiety I felt to hear more may be imagined by every true
patriot; but I was forced to brood on in silent thought, and utter my
poor prayers for friends who perchance were now no more, until I reached
the other side of the continent.

A considerable trade is carried on by the Cassange merchants with all
the surrounding territory by means of native traders, whom they term
"Pombeiros". Two of these, called in the history of Angola "the trading
blacks" (os feirantes pretos), Pedro Joao Baptista and Antonio Jose,
having been sent by the first Portuguese trader that lived at Cassange,
actually returned from some of the Portuguese possessions in the East
with letters from the governor of Mozambique in the year 1815, proving,
as is remarked, "the possibility of so important a communication between
Mozambique and Loanda."