The number of men sacrificed in public is about fourteen, of whom the first three or four only are thrown down by the king; but, in addition to the public sacrifices, a certain number of victims are allotted to the Amazons, and are put to death by them within the precincts of the palace, where no man may be present to inquire too inquisitively into their peculiar rites.
In Dahomey we have none of those wholesale massacres in which hundreds of human beings are sacrificed, such as occur from time to time in Ashanti. In the latter country dozens of slaves are immolated at the death of even a very minor chief, but in Dahomey only one slave is allowed to be executed at the demise of the person next in authority to the king himself, and the number annually put to death in the whole kingdom is said not to exceed eighty.
The following is an instance of how horrors of this kind are exaggerated. A few years ago England was convulsed with horror at reading in the daily papers of hetacombs of slaves having been bled to death in a broad and shallow pit at Abomey, so that the king might enjoy the novelty of paddling about in a canoe in a sea of blood. What really occurred was that at the grand custom, which always takes place at the death of a king, the blood of the victims, about thirty in number, was collected into shallow pools about three feet square, and miniature canoes from six to nine inches long were set afloat in them.
The practice of human sacrifices is, however, gradually dying out in Dahomey; and, year by year, the number of persons sacrificed becomes smaller and smaller. The walls of the king’s palace, and those surrounding the residences of some of the principal chiefs, are generally crowned with human skulls, placed side by side throughout the entire length. Not many years ago it was considered a sign of poverty or of great neglect if any of these ghastly ornaments, which had become destroyed from exposure to wind, sun, and rain, were not at once replaced by fresh skulls. Now, however, they are suffered to decay, and no one thinks it necessary to sacrifice a slave in order to keep the coping of the wall of his yard in good condition.
No doubt the diminution in the number of sacrifices is in a great measure due to the fact that there are no longer any small independent tribes on the borders of Dahomey on whom war could be made, and from whom a constant supply of victims could be obtained. This source was exhausted in the early part of the present century; and the only people against whom “slave hunts” can be organized are the Egbas, and these have usually terminated so unfortunately for the Dahomans that they seem lately to have lost all taste for the amusement. The persons now commonly sacrificed at the “Customs” are criminals, and their crimes would be punished capitally in even far more civilised kingdoms than that of Dahomey, though scarcely with the same surroundings and barbarity.