The rattle-snake is said to be, above all other species,
the most susceptible of attention to the tunes of the Mandingueiros."
The above accounts I should not have related upon the authority of one
or two authors, I have heard them repeated by several individuals, and
even some men of education have spoken of the reputed efficacy of the
tame snakes of the Mandingueiros, as if they were somewhat staggered in
their belief of it. "These men do certainly play strange tricks and very
dexterously." The same writer also observes, "One of the negroes whom I
had hired with the plantation of Jaguaribi, had one leg much thicker
than the other. This was occasioned, as he told me, by the bite of a
rattlesnake; he said he had been _cured_ from the bites of snakes by a
certain _curador de cobra_, or Mandingueiro, and had therefore not died;
but that as the 'moon was strong,' he had not escaped receiving some
injury from the bite."
Beaver, in his African Memoranda, says, "There is another sort of people
who travel about in the country, called Mandingo-men, (these are
Mahommedans;) they do not work; they go from place to place, and when
they find any chiefs or people, whom they think they can make anything
of, they take up their abode sometime with them, and make _gree-grees_,
and sometimes cast seed from them for which they make them pay.
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