From what the travellers could learn, it was pretty certain that Obie would not let them go without exacting a considerable ransom. He may doubtless have been driven to this by the importunity of his favourites, but it was more likely the result of the greed of the people of Bonny and Brass, who quarrelled as to which tribe should carry off the English to their country. A son of the Chief of Bonny, King Pepper, a native named Gun, brother of King Boy, and their father King Forday, who with King Jacket govern the whole of the Brass country, were the most eager in their demands, and produced as proofs of their honourable intentions the testimonials given to them by the European captains with whom they had business relations. One of these documents, signed James Dow, captain of the brig "Susan" of Liverpool, and dated from the most important river of the Brass Country, September, 1830, ran thus:-- "Captain Dow states that he never met with a set of greater scoundrels than the natives generally, and the pilots in particular." It goes on in a similar strain heaping curses upon the natives, and charging them with having endeavoured to wreck Dow's vessel at the mouth of the river with a view to dividing his property amongst them. King Jacket was designated as an arrant rogue and a desperate thief. Boy was the only one of common honesty or trustworthiness. After an endless palaver, Obie declared that according to the laws and customs of the country he had a right to look upon the Landers and their people as his property, but that, not wishing to abuse his privileges, he would set them free in exchange for the value of twenty slaves in English merchandise. This decision, which Richard Lander tried in vain to shake, plunged the brothers into the depths of despair, a state of mind soon succeeded by an apathy and indifference so complete that they could not have made the faintest effort to recover their liberty. Add to these mental sufferings the physical weakness to which they were reduced by want of food, and we shall have some idea of their state of prostration. Without resources of any kind, robbed of their needles, cowries, and merchandise, they were reduced to the sad necessity of begging their bread. "But we might as well have addressed our petitions to the stones or trees," says Lander; "we might have spared ourselves the mortification of a refusal. We never experienced a more stinging sense of our own humbleness and imbecility than on such occasions, and never had we greater need of patience and lowliness of spirit. In most African towns and villages we have been regarded as demigods, and treated in consequence with universal kindness, civility, and veneration; but here, alas, what a contrast! we are classed with the most degraded and despicable of mankind, and are become slaves in a land of ignorance and barbarism, whose savage natives have treated us with brutality and contempt."