One Of
These Traders Was A Copt, The Father Of The American Consul At Khartoum;
And, To My Surprise, I Saw The Vessels Full Of Brigands Arrive At
Gondokoro, With The American Flag Flying At The Mast-Head.
Gondokoro was a perfect hell.
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.
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