earthen vessels for boiling their victuals, and wooden spoons for eating them. A piece of baft or of grass matting, bound round their loins, is their only clothing; but the women wear rings and bracelets of beads or cowrie shells, or the seeds of certain plants: their canoes are the hollowed trunks of the bombax or cotton tree, each being from twenty to twenty-four feet long, and from eighteen to twenty inches wide. A rude hoe, or piece of iron stuck through a short wooden handle, is the implement in use for agricultural purposes. The climate is so fine that little is required beyond that of putting the seed into the ground; and so temperate, that all the European fruits, grains, and culinary vegetables might here flourish together. The winter,' says the missionary Carli, of the kingdom of Congo is the mild spring or autumn of Italy; it is not subject to rains, but every morning there falls a dew which fertilizes the earth.' Captain Tuckey found the atmosphere 'cool, dry, and refreshing;' the sun so seldom shining out, that for four or five days together they were unable to get a correct altitude. From Embonima upwards the temperature seldom exceeded 76° by day, and was sometimes as low as 60° by night. Fine, however, as the climate certainly is, it was every where apparent that the general condition of the people was that of extreme poverty. The population too was far more thinly scattered along the banks of the river than could have been supposed. Those vast masses of people mentioned by Carli, Merolla, and most of the missionaries, had no existence in this part of the country; and it would almost seem that those armies, counted by hundreds of thousands, were so many fictions, unless we are to conceive that, in the course of two centuries, wars, pestilence, famine, and the slave trade, have swept them away. The country, however, was evidently improving, both in appearance and population, where the party were compelled to abandon the further prosecution of the journey.

The banks of the Zaire are not the part of Africa where the slave trade at present is carried on with much activity: on the first arrival of the expedition, three Portugueze schooners and four pinnaces were at Embomma; and a schooner under Spanish colours, with an English mate on board of the name of Sherwood, slipped out of the river as the Congo entered it. The chiefs were all intent on trade, and were angry and disappointed when they learned that slaves were not the objects of the expedition; and one of them, on being told that they neither came to trade nor make war, asked, 'What then come for; only to take walk and make book?' It would seem, however, that the saleable slaves are chiefly confined to such as have been taken in war, or kidnapped in the interior, or such as may have

had

had a sentence of death commuted into that of foreign slavery. Domestic slavery exists, but only in a slight degree, and the objects of it are not transferable to foreign traders; but the gradation from domestic to foreign slavery is too short and easy, we should conceive, to afford much security to those who are placed in this humiliating condition. It is stated by Mr. Fitzmaurice that, while he was at Embomma, a man had been condemned to suffer death; that he was taken to Sherwood, the mate of the slave-ship before mentioned, and offered for sale; but that, on being rejected, those who had charge of him bound his hands and feet, and without further ceremony threw him into the river.

The state of society, among the tribes of Congo, appears to be pretty nearly the same as that of all the negro nations; but in their moral and physical character they ought probably to be placed at the lower end of the scale of Africans. The women cultivate the land, carry the produce to market, range the woods for food and firing, manage the canoes in catching fish, and perform all the laborious duties, while the men saunter about, or lie at full length stringing beads or strumming ou some musical instrument; or, if they exert themselves at all, it is in dancing by moonlight. They are represented, however, as lively and good humoured, hospitable to strangers, ready at all times to share their pittance with the passing traveller; and, considering the low state of civilization, far more honest than could have been expected. Their features are neither so strong nor their colour so deep as those of the more northern negroes, and they are said to indicate great simplicity and inuocence. The discovery of some burnt human bones, and of skulls hanging on the branches of trees, on the first entering of the party into the river, made an injurious impression on those who landed, as indicating the practice of eating human flesh; but it was soon discovered that this was the place of public execution. Nothing could be more abhorrent from their practice; and, in fact, a negro cannibal, we verily believe, does not exist.

We cannot be surprized that a people so ignorant should be superstitious. Every one wears about him, and keeps also in his dwelling, a charm against evil, and there is nothing so vile in nature that does not serve for a negro's fetiche ;-the horn, the hoof, the hair, the teeth, and the bones of all manner of quadrupeds-the feathers, beaks, claws, skulls, and bones of birds-the heads and skins of snakes—the shells and fins of fishes-pieces of old iron, copper, wood, seeds of plants—and sometimes a mixture of all or most of them strung together on the same string. They are generally guided, however, by the priest in the choice of a fetiche as a protection against any particular danger; and if it should unfortunately happen

that

that the wearer perishes by the very means against which the charm had been adopted, it is not for want of power in the fetiche, but for the possessor having offended it. On this account, when a man has predetermined to commit an act, which may be displeasing to his fetiche, or which his conscience tells him he ought not to do, he lays aside his guardian deity, and covers him up, that he may not behold the wickedness which he is about to commit. This may be superstition; but it is not confined to the African savage. Louis the Eleventh, a faithless, rapacious, and cruel despot, is said to have covered his whole body with reliques and scapularies, to which some supposed virtue was attached; but his favourite fetiche was a leaden image of the Virgin, which he always wore on his hat, and such was the veneration which this tutelary guardian exacted from the monarch, that, whenever he was about to perform a wicked or unjust act, he always put it aside. It is worthy of remark that the word fetiche, which extends throughout the whole of the negro coast, is Portugueze-fetiço, a charm or witchcraft; and we perhaps shall not be far amiss in supposing this nation to have encouraged, rather than used any endeavour to suppress, the superstitious notions of the ignorant natives.

The language of Congo, it would appear from some observations of Mr. Marsden, extends quite across the continent, and many of its words are found to correspond not only with the language of Mosambique, but also with that of the Caffres, near the Cape of Good Hope; but it does not appear to possess any of that complicated mechanism which some authors have assigned to it, or to have required that meditative genius, foreign to the habitual condition of the people,' which Malte-Brun seems to have discovered in its construction. A copious vocabulary of the Malemba and Embomma languages, collected by Captain Tuckey, is contained in the Appendix.

We now proceed to lay before our readers a brief biographical notice of each of the sufferers on this ill-fated expedition, the melancholy catastrophe of which has added so largely to the catalogue of martyrs to the spirit of African discovery.

JAMES HINGSTON TUCKEY, the youngest son of Thomas Tuckey, Esq. of Greenhill, near Mallow, was born in 1776, went to sea in 1791, served on board the Suffolk as master's mate at the capture of Trincomallee, when he received a slight wound in his left arm; and assisted at the surrender of Amboyna, famous,' as he observes in a letter to his friends, for Dutch cruelty and English forbearance.' Here, when in the act of firing a gun, it burst, and broke his right arm. 'Having no surgeon on board,' he writes, "I was obliged to officiate for myself, and set it in a truly sailor-like fashion,

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so that in a week after it was again obliged to be broken, by the advice of the surgeon.' For his exertions in quelling a mutiny which broke out in the Suffolk, bearing the flag of 'Rear-Admiral Rainier, that officer appointed him acting lieutenant. While at Madras in a prize, he volunteered into the Sybille, on intelligence being received of the French frigate La Forte cruizing in the Bay of Bengal; and in the gallant action which ensued, Lieutenant Tuckey commanded on the forecastle.

In 1799 he was sent with dispatches for Admiral Blankett, then commanding in the Red Sea. Here the excessive heat seems to have laid the foundation of a complaint which never left him. 'It may surprize you' (he writes from Bombay) to hear me complain of heat, after six years broiling between the tropics; but the hottest day I ever felt, either in the East or the West Indies, was winter to the coolest one we had in the Red Sea. The whole coast of "Araby the Blest," from Babelmandel to Suez, for forty miles inland, is an arid sand, producing not a single blade of grass nor affording one drop of fresh water; that which we drank for nine months, on being analyzed, was found to contain a very considerable portion of sea salt. In the Red Sea, the thermometer at midnight was never lower than 94°, at sun-rise 104°, and at noon 112°. In India the medium is 820, the highest 94°. On a second visit to this inland sea, he experienced so violent an attack of the liver, and was so much debilitated, that a return to Europe was the only chance of saving his life.

His native climate had the desired effect, and in 1802 he was appointed first lieutenant of the Calcutta, when sent to form an establishment in New South Wales. Here he made several surveys, and particularly one of Port Philip, and on reaching England in 1804, published an account of the voyage. The following year the Calcutta, in bringing home a valuable convoy from St. Helena, was met by the Rochefort squadron, consisting of five sail of the line and two frigates. For the preservation of this convoy, Captain Woodriff determined to engage the whole squadron, and maintained a sort of running fight in a direction opposite to the course of the convoy, till he saw it out of danger, and the Calcutta became perfectly unmanageable, and was compelled to surrender. Captain Woodriff, after an imprisonment of eighteen months, was exchanged for a French officer of equal rank; but Lieutenant Tuckey was kept in confinement till the termination of the war. The Court Martial having most honourably acquitted Captain Woodriff, his officers, and ship's company,' the Captain delivered a paper to the court to the following effect: I cannot, Mr. President, and members of this honourable Court, omit to express to you how much I regret that the captivity of Lieutenant Tuckey, late first lieutenant of his Majesty's

VOL. XVIII. NO. XXXVI.

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Majesty's ship Calcutta, should be a bar to the promotion he so highly merits; his courage, cool intrepidity, and superior abilities as a seaman and an officer, entitle him to my warmest gratitude, and render him most worthy of the attention of the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.'

In 1806, Mr. Tuckey married a fellow-prisoner, Miss Margaret Stuart, daughter of the commander of a ship in the East India Company's service at Bengal. She also had been taken by the Rochefort squadron on her passage, to join her father in India. In vain Mr. Tuckey and his friends exerted themselves in procuring his release, by exchange or otherwise; and it was not till after repeated refusals that he even obtained permission, in 1810, for his wife to visit England to look after his concerns. Her object accomplished, she procured passports to return to France by way of Morlaix here she was detained, and after six weeks sent back to England.

On the advance of the allied armies into France in 1814, Mr. Tuckey was ordered to Blois, and, with his two little boys, obliged to travel in the most severe weather, he says, that he ever experienced. His youngest son fell a victim to fatigue and sickness. 'I had indeed,' says the father, 'a hard trial with my little boy, for after attending him day and night for three weeks, (he had no mother, no servant, no friend but me to watch over hini,) I received his last breath, and then had not only to direct his interment, but also to follow him to the grave, and recommend his innocent soul to his God: this was indeed a severe trial, but it was a duty, and I did not shrink from it.' But one still more severe awaited him shortly after his arrival in England: he had the misfortune to lose a fine child, a girl of seven years of age, in consequence of her clothes taking fire, after lingering several days in excruciating agony.

On account of Mr.Tuckey's meritorious services in the Calcutta, and his sufferings and long imprisonment in France, Lord Melville promoted him, in the year-1814, to the rank of commander; and in the following year, on hearing of the intention of sending an expedition to explore the Zaire, he applied, among several others, to be appointed to that service. His abilities were unquestionable: he was an excellent surveyor, spoke several languages, and during his confinement he had stored his mind with such various knowledge, and had turned his attention so particularly to the subject of nautical discovery and river navigation, that he appeared to be in every respect eligible for the service, and accordingly was entrusted with the command, of which his narrative is the best proof that he was not undeserving. His zeal to accomplish the objects of the expedition appears to have been without bounds, and his unwearied exertions evidently brought on his old disorder. He returned to the ships

from