aroused by dreadful screams; they immediately went ashore, but they
came too late, the cries had ceased--the man had breathed his last in
the folds of an enormous serpent, which they killed. They cut off the
head of the snake and carried it, together with the lifeless body of
their comrade, to the vessel; the right wrists of the corpse bore the
marks of the serpent's teeth, and the disfigured body showed that the
man had been crushed by the constriction of the reptile round the
head, neck, breast, and thigh."

Mr. McLeod, in his voyage of H.M.S. Alceste, after describing the mode
in which a python on board, sixteen feet in length, crushed and gorged
a goat, the distressing cries of which on being introduced into the
serpent's cage, could not but excite compassion, goes on to say that
during a captivity of some months at Whidah, in the kingdom of
Dahomey, on the coast of Africa, he had opportunities of observing
pythons of more than double that size, and which were capable of
swallowing animals much larger that goats or sheep. "Governor Abson,"
he adds, "who had for thirty-seven years resided at Fort William, one
of the African Company's settlements there, describes some desperate
struggles which he had seen, or which had come to his knowledge,
between the snakes and wild beasts as well as the smaller cattle, in
which the former were always victorious. A negro herdsman belonging to
Mr. Abson, and who afterwards limped for many years about the fort,
had been seized by one of these monsters by the thigh; but from his
situation in a wood the serpent in attempting to throw himself around
him got entangled in a tree; and the man being thus preserved from a
state of compression, which would instantly have rendered him quite
powerless, had presence of mind enough to cut with a large knife which
he carried about with him, deep gashes in the neck and throat of his
antagonist, thereby killing him, and disengaging himself from his