A SPECIMEN BAY WITH THE FAN CANNIBALS. 59 
the noble savage. On the eastern parts of the continent 
there are two cannibal tribes, the Wacloe and the 
Wabembe ; and it is curious to find the former occupy- 
ing the position assigned by Ptolemy (iv. 8) to his 
anthropophagi of the Barbaricus Sinus : according to 
their own account, however, the practice is modern. 
When weakened by the attacks of their Wakamba 
neighbours, they began to roast and eat slices from the 
bodies of the slain in presence of the foe. The latter, 
as often happens amongst barbarians, and even amongst 
civilized men, could dare to die, but were unable to face 
the horrors of becoming food 
after death : the great Cortez 
knew this feeling when he made 
his soldiers pretend anthropo- 
phagy. Many of the Wadoe ne- 
groids are tall, well made, and 
light complexioned, though in- 
habiting the low and humid coast 
regions — a proof, if any were 
wanted, that there is nothing un- 
wholesome in man’s flesh. Some 
of our old accounts of shipwrecked 
seamen, driven to the dire neces- 
sity of eating one another, in- 
sinuate that the impious food 
causes raging insanity. The Wa- 
bembe tribe, occupying a strip of 
land on the western shore of the Tanganyika Lake, are 
“ Menschenfresser,” as they were rightly called by the 
authors of the “ Mombas Mission Map.” These miser- 
ables have abandoned to wild growth a most prolific soil ; 
too lazy and unenergetic to hunt or to fish, they devour 
all manner of carrion, grubs, insects, and even the 
corpses of their deceased friends. The Midgan, or slave- 
caste of the semi-Semitic Sornal, are sometimes reduced 
to the same extremity ; but they are ever held, like the 
Wendigo, or man-eaters, amongst the North American 
Indians, impure and detestable. On the other hand, 
the Tupf-Guarams of the Brazil, a country abounding 
THE CANNIBAL. 
