[11] Burton, in his “Mission to the King of Dahomey,” notices that the fetish priests are a kind of secret police for the despotic king, and exercise the same influence as in Hayti. They are supposed to be able to give health, wealth, length of days, and can compass the destruction of the applicant’s foes, all for a fee. Bosman, in his account of the slave coast of Guinea, says that a negro who offered opposition to the priests was poisoned by them, and became speechless and paralysed in his limbs; and that if any woman betrays the secrets of the priests, she is burnt to death. [12] Barbot states that the common food of the natives of the kingdom of Ansiko (west coast of Africa) is man’s flesh, insomuch that their markets are provided with it, as ours in Europe with beef and mutton. All prisoners of war, unless they can sell them alive to greater advantage, they fatten for slaughter, and at last sell them to butchers to supply the markets, and roast them on spits, as we do other meat (date 1700).--Churchill’s Collection, vol. v. p. 479. Barbot also notices that the people of Jagos, Congo, and Angola were also cannibals. [13] Barbot, in his account of the Ansiko kingdom, says: “That which is most inhuman is, that the father makes no difficulty to eat the son, nor the son the father, nor one brother the other; and whosoever dies, be the disease ever so contagious, yet they eat the flesh immediately as a choice dish.”--Barbot, in Churchill’s Collection, vol. v. p. 479. [14] I may here notice that the Haytians have chosen the mountain cabbage-palm (_Palma nobilis_) as the tree of liberty in the national arms. It is in nature a beautiful palm, with its dark-green foliage and perfect shape. The cap of liberty stuck on the top of it makes it look rather ludicrous, and the arms around its base are not very appropriate to so unmilitary a people. [15] “Nous ne sommes plus aux temps où quelques rares curés, repartis dans les principales paroisses de la république faisaient d’énormes bénéfices par des moyens souvent hélas reprouvés par la conscience et par les lois de l’église.... Qu’ai-je besoin d’évoquer dans le passé les lamentables souvenirs de l’église en Haïti. Je suis prêtre, et je voudrais pour l’honneur du sacerdoce pouvoir laver son opprobre de mes larmes et de les plonger dans un éternel oubli. Mais il ne dépend ni de moi ni de personne d’en effacer la triste mémoire.”--Monseigneur A. Guilloux, Archbishop of Port-au-Prince. [16] “Ne suffit-il pas d’ailleurs de parcourir les villes et les bourgades de la république pour rencontrer encore les témoins vivants d’un libertinage sans exemple.”--Guilloux.