10 Biographical Memoir ofBaroti de Beauvois. 



one of the strangest political doctrines that any legislator could 

 have established, to render the steward of the prince the neces- 

 sary depositary of the first state secret ; but a more cruel doc- 

 trine, which requires no secrecy, is that which among this people 

 continually requires human sacrifices. They are still very nu- 

 merous in Benin, and at ihe feasts to which M. de Beauvois was 

 invited, he was more than once the unwilling spectator of them. 



After studying as much as he could the manners of the Ne- 

 groes of the interior, he returned to Oware, and left it by ano- 

 ther route for Bono-Pozzo, the frontier town of the kingdom on 

 the side next the desert. His project was to enter the desert it- 

 self, and traverse Africa, if he had found but a single person to ac- 

 company him ; but his Negroes left him, and he at length found 

 himself obliged to return to the settlement. His weakness, how- 

 ever, increased at each relapse, and a last attack reduced him to 

 such a state, that his friend Landolphe saw no other means of 

 saving him than to force him on board a slave-ship, bound for St 

 Domingo. His departure having been scarcely anticipated, and 

 the vessel already overloaded, he could only take his journals with 

 him. All that he left in Landolphe's hands was destroyed in 

 1791 5 when the settlement was pillaged by the English, six months 

 l)efore the declaration of war. The very papers which he carried 

 with him were burnt in 1793, in the conflagration of Cape Fran- 

 ^ais ; and of the fruits of so many arduous labours, there only 

 escaped the parts sent directly from Oware to M. de Jussieu, 

 who carefully preserved them, and sent them untouched to his 

 friend, after an absence of twelve years. 



All his dangers, however, were not over when he left Africa. 

 An ignorant and brutal captain was the means of protracting the 

 voyage to a period of five months. Frightful calamities over- 

 whelmed the crew. Out of 250 Negroes which the vessel carried, 

 180 were thrown overboard, having died of consumption and 

 small-pox. M. de Beauvcns, treated with barbarity by the cap- 

 tain, who thought him a spy of the privateers, was attacked vrith 

 scurvy and an eruption of a virulent nature. He would infalli- 

 bly have perished, had it not been for the attention of the cook 

 of the ship. At length, on the 28tli June 1788, he arrived at 

 French Cape in St Domingo, in such a state of weakness, tliat a 

 surgeon of the name of Durand, was the only man who would 



