The money
thus collected was taken into the interior of the country and
expended in the purchase of two sickly persons "to be offered as a
sacrifice for all these abominable crimes--one for the land and one
for the river." A man from a neighbouring town was hired to put them
to death. On the twenty-seventh of February 1858 the Rev. J. C.
Taylor witnessed the sacrifice of one of these victims. The sufferer
was a woman, about nineteen or twenty years of age. They dragged her
alive along the ground, face downwards, from the king's house to the
river, a distance of two miles, the crowds who accompanied her
crying, "Wickedness! wickedness!" The intention was "to take away
the iniquities of the land. The body was dragged along in a
merciless manner, as if the weight of all their wickedness was thus
carried away." Similar customs are said to be still secretly
practised every year by many tribes in the delta of the Niger in
spite of the vigilance of the British Government. Among the Yoruba
negroes of West Africa "the human victim chosen for sacrifice, and
who may be either a freeborn or a slave, a person of noble or
wealthy parentage, or one of humble birth, is, after he has been
chosen and marked out for the purpose, called an _Oluwo.
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