214 
A Specimen Day 
food, does not spare the white traveller more than 
it does his dark guides; and, though the moral 
courage of the former may resist the “gastronomic 
practice ” of breaking fast upon a fat young slave, 
one does not expect so much from the untutored 
appetite of the noble savage. On the eastern parts 
of the continent there are two cannibal tribes, the 
Wadoe and the Wabembe; and it is curious to 
find the former occupying the position assigned by 
Ptolemy (iv. 8) to his anthropophagi of the Bar- 
bar icus 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 anthropophagy. Many of the 
Wadoe negroids are tall, well made, and light com- 
plexioned, though inhabiting the low and humid 
coast regions—a proof, if any were wanted, that 
there is nothing unwholesome in mans flesh. 
Some of our old accounts of shipwrecked seamen, 
driven to the dire necessity of eating one another, 
insinuate that the impious food causes raging in¬ 
sanity. The Wabembe tribe, occupying a strip of 
land on the western shore of the Tanganyika 
