Polygamy Is Allowed To Any Extent, And It Is Generally Carried As Far As The Means Of The Gentlemen Will Admit, As, After A Short Period, Or Honeymoon, The Women Are Employee In The Fields And Plantations, And Usually Are No Better Situated Than The Common Servants Of Their Husbands.

Adultery is punished by slavery, or the value of a slave, by the offender, and the lady likewise subjects

Herself to be sold, but it is remarked that this measure is seldom resorted to, and it sometimes happens that a handsome wife is repeatedly turned to advantage by her husband, in alluring the unwary into heavy damages.

The state of women is upon the whole very abject in Dahomy. Wives approach their husbands with every mark of the humblest submission. In presenting him even with a calabash containing his food, after she has cooked it, she kneels and offers it with an averted look, it being deemed too bold to stare him full in the face. By their constantly practising genuflexion upon the bare ground, their knees become in time almost as hard as their heels.

A mutinous wife or a vixen, sometimes the treasure and delight of an Englishman; the enlivener of his fireside, and his safeguard from ennui, is a phenomenon utterly unknown in Dahomy - that noble spirit, which animates the happier dames in lands of liberty, being here, alas! extinguished and destroyed.

In most nations a numerous progeny is considered a blessing, as being likely to prop the declining years of their parents, but in Dahomy, children are taken from their mothers at an early age, and distributed in villages remote from the places of their nativity, where they remain with but little chance of being ever seen, or at least recognized by their parents afterwards.

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