32 Proeeedings of the Unijal Irish Academy. 



himself with a crocodile skin, aud takes to the water, lurking amongst the 

 mangrove roots to obtain his victim. The members of this society are 

 supposed to have a double canoe called a konkobai, formed by two canoes, 

 one much smaller than the other, ha\'ing their bottoms fastened together. 

 This is put in the water with the small canoe downwards, and so evenly 

 that the latter contains a good deal of air. The lower canoe acts as a sort 

 of diving-bell, which is entered by a man diving underneath it from up 

 stream. Another man, seated above, paddles the canoe along, and when he 

 comes to a watering- or washing-place the alligator man below dives, and, 

 seizing a child, drags it under the water, and returns to the boat. In the 

 Bullom country is a secret creek called the ilosimp creek, which few are 

 allowed to enter, or if they do, they do not come back. In the old days the 

 chiefs and queens of the country used to go there and make ceremony once a 

 year, and, my informant said, still do so. There is much reason to believe 

 that these two peoples are the remnants of a race known to the Arab 

 historians of the Soudan as the Lem-Lem, or Gem-Gem, a degraded cannibal 

 people who were always pushed south to the unhealthy bush districts along 

 the coast. 



The Sherbros would not seem to have reached Sherbro before 1607, as in 

 a manuscript letter giATng an account of a ^'isit of Captain Hawkins to Sien-a 

 Leone in that year, mention is made of " the island which we feU in with 

 some ten leagues south from the Bay of Sierra Leone, in lat. 8° N., has no 

 inhabitants, neither did I learn its name." In the same letter, which is 

 preserved in the Eegistrar-General's Office at Freetown, it is stated that to 

 the south of this bay, some thiity or forty leagues into the interior country, 

 there are very fierce people who are cannibals, and sometimes infest the 

 natives of Sierra Leoue, who, in the same manuscript, are thus described : — 

 " The men of this country are large and well made, strong and courageous, 

 and of civilized manners for heathens ; as they keep most faithful to their 

 wives, of whom they are not a little jealous. . . . All the children are 

 circumcised. . . . The king and a few of his principal attendants are 

 decently clothed in jackets and breeches : but the common people have only 

 a short cotton cloth round their waists ; while the women have a kind 

 of short petticoat or apron down to their knees, all the rest of theu- bodies 

 having no dress whatever. All the people, both men and women, have aU 

 parts of their bodies very curiously and ingeniously traced and pinked 

 (tattoed), and have their teeth filed very sharp. They pull ofi" all the hau- 

 from their eyelids. The men have their beards short, black, and cropped, 

 and the hair of their heads strangely cut into crisped paths or eross-aUeys ; 

 whUe others wear theirs in strange, jagged tufts, or other foolish forms, the 



