Secret Poisons for Their Enemies

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 998, 14 June 1930, Page 18

Secret Poisons for Their Enemies

Black Magic and Voodoo practices belonging to .‘he Dark Ages within a few hours' rid • of the civilisation to be found in Jamaica. Paganism still exists, in spite of the advances of modem life , as the following story indicates. The writer , an American girl (according to the San Francisco “Chronicle”) ventured into the West Indies in quest of “the curse of Obeah"—and found it !

HERE is voodoo in the j West Indies, but they caU 11 Obeah. II The tourist need hot fear it. for it is more difficult to get at than the proverbial needle in the haystack. One gathers the impression that the inhabitants, both white and native, have formed a combine to keep one from learning anything of Obeah. Take, for example, Jamaica. "Oh, no.” they tell you laughingly, “there is no Obeah here. That is all just a myth. There used to be, perhaps, but not now. That’s old stuff." Yes, it is—as old as Africa—and as new as the latest child born with a black skin. For the witchcraft of Africa, like the “patois” of Africa, has come down through the ages. I had spent six weeks at the most fashionable hotel in Kingston and I had not been able to get any information on black sorcery. I was becoming discouraged. Had I, then, come many miles and endured the heat and seasickness only to meet with failure? Yet the very next day 1 found out all that I wanted to know about obeah. I want to return to Jamaica some day. so I shall not tell you how 1 found it out. 1 will only say that my information did not come from a white man.

“Obeah," he told me, “is what you call a first cousin to voodooism. A serpent in the Egyptian language was called ‘cb - or ‘aub,' and ‘obion’ is still the Egyptian name for a serpent. Obeah is derived from the word ‘obi.’ a word used on the east coast of Africa to denote witchcraft, sorcery and fetishism in general. Knowledge of poisonous plants and hushes, unknown to medicine but found in every tropical woods, gives old Obeah men their means of poison, and they are poisons that cannot be detected.

“These Obeah men also give out love charms. Sea water with laundry bluing in it and a dead cockroach, with maybe a few rusty nails and a bit of red flannel, make excellent charms. “If you have an enemy, you go to the Obeah man and tell him you wish revenge. The Obeah man agrees to •put Obeah on him’ and will tell you just what to expect. You, In turn, can have the satisfaction of threatening this enemy with what you are going lo do to him. Chances are he will die of fright thinking about it, especially if you put his punishment a few days into the future and give him time to think. And it will happen just as you have predicted. It will surely happen if the Obeah man lias promised it. They never fail. "But madame must not talk so openly of Obeah. It is not considered good taste. We know of it, but we do not discuss it. It is not necessary. Besides, under white rule, one is thrown into prison if be is found even admitting Obeah. The English believe they have killed it in their colonies. So we let the white man dream on. He likes to dream in the tropics. It is so comfortable. But. we of the dark skin know that Obeah will never die."

He looked at me for a long minute, his eyes searching mine till I looked away. Then he said: “Madame does not believe me. She thinks me sincere, but she mistrusts the words I speak. Therefore, she must go now.

Night will fall soon and: she must not be found here. The hotel will send for her; the English are very particular about tlieir guests. She must go and she must not come hack. But some day before she leaves these islands she should meet Dr. George Osgood, a white doctor, who lives at Bridge Penn. Old Hope Road, above l.adv Musgrave Road. His plantation has a white bridge before it. Madame cannot miss it. And when she has talked with him about his butler, who died recently under the Obeah curse, she will understand.’’ I met Dr. Osgood through a mutual friend and the following night dined with him at his home. I hesitated to ask about the curse of Obeah until the servants retired. At 10 o’clock I asked the doctor to tell me about the butler. “Not yet," he said significantly, and looked be yond me into the drawing room, which was bathed in darkness. At midnight, when the night watchman had passed us on his rounds and would be gone for thirty minutes, he told me. “I am going to tell you about this situation,” he began, "with the understanding that you do not write a word of it until I am away from Jamaica. I leave soon for the French Riviera, where I shall make my home, and the day I sail I shall cable you, releasing you from your promise. Do you agree?” I nodded.

“Shortly after Laing, the butler, came here he Informed me one morning that the "servants were stealing wines and other delicacies from the storeroom. I told him that his authority over them was absolute and to clean the house if lie wanted to. He later told me. that he had discharged a girl who was a cleaner on the place. She had been stealing the wine for her sweetheart, who worked outside. When he had dismissed her she had ‘put Obeah on him’ and had said: ‘You’ll be dead within ten days—going into that very storeroom.’ "We did not take the threat seriously, of course. We considered Obeah merely a superstition among the natives, and when six days had passed and nothing had happened we almost forgot the matter. “On the noon of the seventh day after she had put the curse on him lie served luncheon as usual and seemed in good spirits. I had decided to take the family for a drive’ to Castleton Gardens. Mrs. Osgood, myself, the nurse and driver got into the car. Laing closed the door of the machine and appeared well and happy. One of our sudden tropical rains blew up and we started back home, returning.. In less than an hour after we had started.

“We had left fifteen servants on .the place, and as we drove in the garden hoy came up and said, very matter-of-fact: ’Mr. Laing dead.' He just seemed to take it for granted. “‘Where is he?’ I asked, jumping out of the car. They had let him lay where he fell, fearing to touch him on account of the Obeah curse. I admit it was a shock when they led me to the body, lying just outside the storeroom door.

"The point which impressed me about his condition was that, even when I first found him, his body was rigid, a very unnatural thing unless he had been given strychnine or some other poison. The servants all declared he had taken nothing, and there was no mark whatever on his body. But where he lay there was a distinct odour which resembled embalming fluid.

“A post-mortem revealed nothing, but my personal opinion is that he was killed by an odour produced from some poisonous plant grown here, I

which kills instantly when it is inhaled. This is carried out by the distinct odour which lingered for days around the storeroom. Or iterhaps it was some other tropical poison. There are so many’ of them about which we know nothing. “Let me leave one thought in your mind and remember it whenever yon hear the word Obeah mentioned. Obeah is poison, nine times out of ten.”

I remembered it. L remembered it when I sat one night on the hurrican deck of the Royal Mail liner j Araguaya sailing through the Wind- | ward Passage between Jamaica and j Haiti. The captain sat beside me in a deck chair and we talked of many things—books he had written and the tropics. I mentioned Obeah and my interest in it. “You are in luck,” he said. “My chief officer is the onlywhite man I ever heard of who has had Obeah put on him, and the odd part of it is he lived to tell it.- I’ll get him up here and see if we can make him talk, but he is very reluctant to say anything about it.” His full name is H. M. S. Laidlaw, Royal Division, Royal Mail Reserves, chief officer, s.s. Araguaya. He wears medals on his blue coat showing heroism in British naval battles. And he laughed a great deal—till I mentioned Obeah. “Good Heavens,” lie exclaimed, “you’re not fooling around with that, are you?” But between the captain and myself we finally got him to tell this story;—“It was in 1912, on the Island of Dominaqua, near the Virgin Islands. I was chief then on a smaller ship than this, and we spent most of Our time among these islands and around England. One day in the harbour, going into Dominaqua, a native spoke insultingly to a white woman. As we were near shore anyhow-, I thought I’i:l teach him a lesson, so I picked him up and threw him overboard. Of course, he swam , jike a fish to shore, which I knew he . would do. And when he got there he* had me hauled into court, which I also expected. “The Judge, as luck would have it, was a white man, but he took me aside and said: “I’ll have to charge you something to keep the natives quiet—and get away as soon as you can.’ So he charged me £1 and I started to leave the courtroom w-hen a huge black woman, the sweetheart of the native 1 had pitched into the harbour, rose and called after me, in a sort of chant: “ ‘Chief, the first foot you put again on Dominiqua will rot off; chief, the first foot you put again on Dominiqua will rot off.’ She kept repeating it and the other natives took it up. It looked for a minute like an uprising, but .1 walked out and nothing happened. We sailed that night, hlft we were back in three weeks. “As I stepped over the gangplank on to the island the captain of my ship said to me: ‘Watch which foot you put on the ground first and see if anything happens.’ Ordinarily I would Have put my right foot first, but, just to be contrary, I put my left one first. I was there two ■ days and nothing at all happened. We sailed for England the second night and I laughed about the threat. But two days out to sea I noticed an itching sensation on the underside of my left leg, just back of my knee. It was in I just the place where the leg bends I when I sat down, and it grew steadily | worse till by night I was ■in agony | with it. It had begun to swell and; throbbed so that I was compelled to call in the captain to look at it. 1 could not see it myself, but he said there was a hard lump about the size of an almond and that it was turning black. We had on board as a passenger a famous English surgeon. He j came down and said I was threatened with gangrene, or something which acted like it, and that an immediate operation would be necessary if we were to save my leg. We had no anaesthetics, but vre got along. I still have a hole in my leg larger than n walnut, but we cut off the Obeah poi son. And I grew steadily better, catching it before it went through my system. “Back in England I write to a white friend in Dominiqua and he found out how they had got me, though he couldn’t prove it. He said that when I left my laundry on the island to be washed I made a mistake, because they took a little prickly point from some fruit or plant., like a cactus point, and dipped it in deadly poison. Then : they took it to the native woman who j was washing my white duck trousers ' and she inserted it in the leg of the i trousers where it would prick my skin j when I bent my knee. Sounds far- j fetched to you, perhaps, but I’m sure ; they must have done something with : my laundry to have their curse work i out exactly as they had threatened." j And as he started for the deck below he paused and put his hand on my shoulder. “Keep away from Obeah.' he advised. “It’s bad business.” But don’t let all this keep you from the West Indies.. Chances are you won’t be throwing any natives over board and, unless you do something at least that bad, they will not bother I you with Obeah. But if you do go j and the native servants are unruly, j remember the Obeab curse; and when J they have driven you to distraction with their dumbness simply say: “I’m going to put Obeah on you.” They’!! understand that, and you’ll get results that will amaze you probablv more than this story has done.