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From their obscure beginnings in the eighteenth century to the final year or two of their existence in the 1890s, the basic weapon of the amazons was the smooth-bore, muz-zle-loaded flintlock musket. It was also the firearm of choice of the American Revolution and of all European wan through the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth.

Flintlocks consisted of the proverbial lock, stock and barrel. The metal barrel, from 38 to 47 inches long, was closed at the stock end by a screwed, and possibly welded, plug. It was secured to the wooden stock by pins or bands. Stock and barrel together were from 4 feet 6 to 5 feet 2 inches long. The complex metal lock mechanism was on the right side of the stock at the rear end, or breech, of the barrel, It was composed of the following: (a) a jawlike cock (now called hammer) that gripped a piece of flint, was under pressure from a mainspring and was controlled by a trigger; (b) a pan covered by a piece of metal called a frizzen that curved upward at the front end; (4 a vent or touch-hole, being a narrow passage connecting the pan to the interior of the barrel; (d) a metal or wooden ramrod attached to the underside of the gun barrel.

Powder, shot or ball and wadding were introduced into the barrel via the muzzle and tamped down with the ramrod. A small amount of powder was also put in the pan. The musketeer pulled back the cock with her/his thumb against the pressure of the mainspring, and the cock was held there by the trigger. When the trigger was pulled, the cock flew forward and the tip of the flint hit the fiizzen, striking sparks. The sparks ignited the priming powder in the pan, which flashed through the vent to fire the powder in the breech and send the shot on its way.

All flintlocks were imported from Europe but their exact provenance was not often stated. Many came from Denmark, which had trading posts on the nearby Gold Coast, and were called "Dane guns" or "long Danes" (some Dane guns were actually made in Germany; they are still used by hunters in West Africa). Others were English-made, including a variety called "buccaneer gun" made in Birmingham and "Tower muskets" tested at the Tower of London arsenal. Still others were called simply "trade guns", meaning they were made expressly for the Atlantic slave trade. The French missionary Emile Courdioux, stationed at Whydah from the early 1860s, reported seeing "long Arab pins from Antwerp, known by the name of 'retreat guns"'.

Besides the standard flintlock musket, amazons used car-bines and blunderbusses that functioned in the same way. Carbines were shorter and lighter than muskets, having been designed originally for cavalrymen. Carbine barrels measured 28 to 37 inches and the overall length ranged from 3 feet 8 inches to 4 feet 6. Whereas a musket might weigh as much as 15 pounds, a carbine might weigh as little as six and a half. A small variety of carbine was known as a mus-ketoon. The blunderbuss was even shorter, from 2 feet 7 to 3 feet 4 inches long, with a larger barrel bore and a flaring muzzle.

As previously noted, amazons were seen with musketoons by 1763-4 (Pruneau) and with blunderbusses by 1772 (Moths). The earliest specific mention of carbines dates to 1856; Repin credits them to the elephant huntresses, but curiously describes the weapons as long and heavy.2 However, the very first armed Dahomean women to be reported, the four who stood behind King Agaja in 1727 (Snelgrave), held "fusils", light flintlocks that closely resembled carbines (and were the original weapon of Britain's Royal Fusiliers).'

The flintlock musket, as one might imagine, took a long time to load. The eighteenth-century European and American soldier could fire it three or four times a minute. Exceptionally, Frederick the Great of Prussia had his men trained to fire off five rounds a minute. According to Poi, the average Dahomean male soldier needed 50 seconds to reload his weapon (which may generally have been of poorer quality than those used in Europe and America) while the amazon required "barely" 30 seconds.'

The flintock musket also had a very limited range. Military historians differ widely on the subject. One expert puts the accuracy of American Revolutionary War muskets at "up to about fifty feet",5 but the standard "Long Land Service Musket" of the British Army was said to have an effective range of 200 yards. The consensus seems to be that a musketeer could expect to hit a target at 80 yards." The main reason a flintlock was not more accurate was that the projectile, or rather projectiles since several bullets were fired at once, oscillated down the smooth barrel, and this initial motion capriciously affected their flight. The problem was solved by spiral grooving, or rifling, that made a bullet spin out of the barrel, dynamically stabilized.

As early as 1862 a Dutch trader named Euschart saw "a few select corps" parade with rifles at Abomey, but did not say whether women were among them.' By 1880 at least a few amazons had rifles, according to Ellis! But it was not till 1891 that modern, rapid-firing, breech-loaded rifles started replacing flintlock muskets in the hands of the majority of Dahomey's male and female soldiers. They were sold to the king by German merchants established in Whydah and only too happy to discomfit the French (five years earlier Germany had occupied neighboring Togo). By the time of the French invasion in the fall of 1892, the Dahomean army had some 4,000 to 6,000 rifles: American Remingtons, Spencers and Winchesters,• Belgian-made American Peabodys, Austrian Mannlichers, Werndls and Wands, German Mausers and Dreyses, British Sniders and Martinis, British or Italian Albinis, even French tabatiltes and chassepots (captured by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1).

Blunderbusses and musketoons, heavy, often overloaded, and with a recoil like a mule's kick, were commonly used as artillery, i.e. they were fired with their butts on the ground (from a kneeling position). But a few amazons were real artillerywomen. In 1850 Forbes saw thirty-two female war-riors parading with "wall-pieces", small cannons that were usually mounted on walls and could be loaded with musket balls. Another group carried "small brass guns". Forbes also mentions a "seven-barrelled arquebuse" but does not say who used it The following year Bouet saw an amazon "company" carrying "copper swivel guns on little wheels"."' He presented to Gezo a French government gift of two bronze field howit-zers and showed how they worked. The king, impressed, said that "such precious weapons could only be entrusted to safe hands, and that, consequently, he would name from among his amazons a company of cannoneers who would be exclusively assigned to their use."" Gezo did as he said: later visitors saw the howitzers and their female crew.12 It was a rare, perhaps unique glimpse of the formation of an amazon unit.

Amazons would handle a bewildering variety of cannons: 6-cm., 8-cm. and 12-cm. pieces, carronades, small mortars, wall-pieces on pivots, swivel "duck-guns", cannons only about a foot long, guns made of iron or brass or bronze. Bouet reported cannons "of all calibers and all epochs",13 and Repin added "of all shapes"." At the end, modern Krupp cannons and even machine-guns were added to the arsenal. Sometimes the guns were mounted on crude carriages (which may have been the first locally made wheeled vehicles in the country). Vallon saw some "infernal machines" (booby traps) mounted on stands:5 But all these weapons were used much more for salutes and general noisemaking than for combat. Dahomey and environs had few roads wider than single-file bush paths. The country had no draft animals, the few available horses being merely status symbols for chiefs. Usually the cannons lacked proper ammunition. And they were too cum-bersome for Dahomey's wan of stealthy, encircling advances and swift surprise attacks.

A few observers suggest the flintlock musket was not the key Dahomean weapon because of its slow reloading time and inaccuracy. It has been said of the American Revolution that after two or three exchanges of musket volleys, the issue typically was decided in hand-to-hand bayonet fighting. Similarly, the decisive weapon in Dahomey's wars may have been a broad, slightly curved, single-edged blade with a hilt that usually lacked a guard and which was called variously a short sword, a cutlass, a saber, a falchion, a billhook, a cleaver, a bush knife or a machete. The blade was about 16 to 20 inches long, and up to four inches wide. Burton describes a related weapon about twice as long that he terms a chopper, and that Skertchly says was stained blue:6 Unlike firearms, these weapons were usually made by local smiths (although they figured among European trade goods too); like firearms, they were a royal monopoly distributed to warriors (and apparently sold to civilians) by the king.

Machetes, as we shall call them, may have been amazon weapons as early as muskets. Pruneau and Norris saw female palace guards carrying them, along with guns." Freeman saw both weapons in the hands of Gezo's female bodyguards,18 and almost every subsequent account of the amazons mentions the machete as well as the musket. Chaudoin, dismissing the Dahomean musket as ineffective at 30 meters, calls the machete "the real weapon, the national weapon", that both male and female warriors "wield with much skill and with which they lop off a limb or a head with a single blow as if it were an ordinary cane of bamboo". He notes that the cutting arm doubled as a work tool in peacetime, used to clear land and open up roads, even to till the soil and build houses:9

Another weapon made locally for royal distribution was the dagger or poniard. It was not remarked in amazon hands until 1843 (Freeman) .29 In 1856 (Repin and Vallon) each elephant huntress sported a dagger at her waist "with a very strong and curved blade".21 Vallon also noted that archeresses wore "a little dagger fixed to the hand by a thong" 22 and Burton made a similar observation, placing the thong round the wrist.23

Bayonets appear in the record in 1850: Beecroft noticed two on poles carried by male soldiers in a procession' Next year Bola watched about 500 amazons parade at Abomey with the thrusting blades attached to their guns 25 Vallon saw a unit of about 200 men who had adopted the bayonet?' Burton, a compulsive wordsmith who got carried away appending the suffix "-ess" to describe amazons and Dahomean women officials, watched "bayoneteeresses" parade, fire and perform "a single verygauche thrust.27Skertchly, who transparently competed with Burton nearly a decade later in relating Dahomean detail, looked for but did not see bayonets on any ems, and it may be that the weapon had been abandoned.

One of Dahomey's annes blanches was unique: a gigantic razor. Invented by one of Gezo's brothers, it simply copied the standard European straightedge but was several times bigger, and is said to have weighed more than 20 pounds. A blade about 24 to 30 inches long folded into a black wooden handle. (Burton put the blade length at about 18 inches; Skertchly corrected him.)215 When extended and held open by a strong spring, the razor measured four to five feet. It was carried over the shoulder. Vallon, who first reported the weapon, said it was made specifically for the amazons who wore Bouet's firemen's helmets (which some-how had doubled from 50 to 100). He dubbed them "the Reapers'?" The razor was wielded with both hands, and, according to Borghero (who raised the total to 200 or 300), could slice a man in half.' Skertchly heard they were intended to decapitate enemy kings.32

Maire claims the razors were not only for heads but for enemy genitals, and that the amazons "had to triumphant17 bring these bloody and ignoble trophies back to the palace". 3 He may have made this up to shock or titillate readers since emasculation would not have demanded such monstrous weapons. (Degbelo also says the female soldiers brought male genitals back to their king as war trophies, but does not suggest that other than ordinary knives were usedr Burton termed the razors "portable guillotines" and thought that if nothing else, "the terror which they inspire may render them useful".5

Battle-axes show up in the record in 1847: Archibald R. Ridgway, a doctor who accompanied an English mission to Abomey, said women of the royal bodyguard were armed with them. He also saw female war chiefs shaking battle-axes with their right hands while making speeches. Vallon in-cludes axes among weapons made locally for kingly dis-tribution." Skertchly mentions an amazon "troop" equipped with skull-decorated axes and assigned to smash open the gates of Abeokuta next time that city was assaulted (a project never consummated).38 He also describes an axe with an oblong iron blade a few inches long that formed an acute angle with the handle, "something like a hoe" and "made more for show than use". It was carried in this instance by slaves of male soldiers.39 Fol says amazons often used axes but at the same time calls the weapon "the emblem of the taboceer", a West African term for chief that included women officers.° He and other authors sometimes mistook authority symbols called recades (see chapter 13) for small axes. But a post-conquest study of Dahomey asserts that axe-headed emblems of rank, with sculpted handles and richly incised blades, slung by chiefs over the shoulder, did indeed double as percussive weapons of war." If so, they would have been arms of last resort.

After firearms and blade weapons, clubs seem to have been of next importance in the amazon armory. Duncan reports "a sort of club" carried by each member of a 600-woman "regiment", along with musket and sword.42 Bouet saw amazon "companies"equipped with "war clubs"? Skertchly listened to amazon singers who carried "short truncheons". He saw elderly warrioresses with iron-bound sticks similar to the lathi wielded by police in India." Courdioux mentions iron bars." Jean Bayol, who headed a French mission to Abomey in 1889, reports "a curved stick of very hard wood", but it is not clear if female as well as male soldiers used it.47 Though Maire reached Abomey after the French con-quest, his reference to an amazon "war club with round headTcasse-totedmasse ronde") seems authentic." Borghero says women reservists, called up from the provinces in wartime (and not to be confused with amazons), carried small clubs to strike enemies in the legs."

Bows and arrows were amazon weapons by 1776, when Labarthe's informant remarked that the more nimble of the king's guardswomen carried them.s° Doubtless the arrows were from the start tipped with poison, standard procedure along the whole coast of West Africa. "The more nimble" amazons were the young recruits, the scantily dressed girls with ivory bracelets on their left arm. Repin thought them "charming",' Brue put the Dahomean bow at a meter long;52 Burton found it peculiar: "It is not straight nor a segment of a circle, but partly both, the lower end being much less bulged than the upper horn, which, to protect the strain, is armed with iron rings."53 And he did not think much of the arrows the girls carried: "a quiver of poisoned light cane shafts—mere birdbolts, with hooked heads, spiny as stick-lebacks"." The archeresses had indeed become more of a show troop than a fighting unit as their weapon was eclipsed by others. Burton said that in the field they were used as scouts, porters and to carry the wounded to the rear.55

Dahomeans were familiar with the crossbow but apparently it was never used by amazons, perhaps because it was too hard to tense, even for those sturdy females. Brue saw male soldiers armed with the weapon. In the waning years of the kingdom, only hunters seem to have had them.57

From time to time in the nineteenth century, beginning in 1830 (Lopez),58 amazons were seen carrying spears or lances or more precisely assegais, light wooden javelins tipped with iron. Repin gauges the weapon's length at 8 to 10 feet, and says that throwers "almost invariably hit the trunk of a palm tree at forty or fifty paces".59 This seems to refer to both male and female warriors. Skertchly saw amazons with "long red-handled brass spears"." In an illustration of Dahomean arms, Courdioux includes a slingshot.6' This doubtless was an indigenous weapon,`' but we do not know if amazons ever used it.

ACCOUTREMENTS

The assortment of weapons meant that amazons were draped with military accoutrements as well as ornaments and charms. Machetes (or "swords" or "falchions") usually hung from waistbands in scabbards. Pruneau describes scabbards of crim-son velvet,63 but by Burton's time they were made of black leather." Repin saw swords suspended from amazon shoulders by leather straps; he says their hilts were covered with sharkskin." Burton reports hilts sheathed in shagreen (un-tanned granulated leather)." An early-twentieth-century French historian of Dahomey, Auguste Le Herisse, mentions swords hung from rope or cloth shoulder-belts.n Arrows demanded "quivers; BouEt noted some "covered with beautiful fur skins",6 Skertchly others made of black leather."

Muskets, carried behind the back on a leather or linen sling, required a number of accessories. Cartridges, containing the gunpowder, and bullets were separate. In Europe and America, the cartridge case was usually made of paper; Repin informs us that in Dahomey it was made of dry banana leaf" Eight to twenty cartridges carrying individual powder charges were kept in wooden or leather cups, tubes or boxes fixed to a leather waist-belt or sometimes to a cloth waistband. Foi noted that amazon dancers and panders had a modified cartridge-belt with only six to eight boxes." Belts worn during the mock attack witnessed by Borghero were covered by a leather strip to protect charges from the rain.92

A few observers speak of powder gourds or flasks or of pouches containing cartridges or priming powder. All the powder had to be imported." A leather bullet-bag or pouch hung by a shoulder-strap to the right side. It usually contained not the lead balls of European or American muskets, which had to be imported, but iron balls or slugs, which could be made locally. Herskovits was told there were twelve forges in the realm and that each ironworker had to furnish the king with a certain number of bullets." Duncan says that Dahomeans did not use wads to compact their powder and ball," but Burton saw wadding of "bamboo fibre"," which may have been more accurately described by Bayol as "very fine straw, called mandine, which comes from the fibers of oil-palm leaves". Bayol says that comhusks were also used." Wads were carried either in the bullet-bag or a separate bag. Ramrods are almost never mentioned, perhaps as too obvious to comment on in the musket era. Forbes says that off-duty warriors, male and female, kept their muskets in covers." Burton saw amazon muskets "protected from damp by a case of black monkey-skin tightly clasping the breeching, and opening to the rear"." Skertchly reports leather covers for musket pans and muzzles, and rags attached to the butt for wiping the dint and cock."

Duncan says each Dahomean soldier, implicitly including the amazons, carried "a piece of small grass rope" for tying captives round the neck, and a piece of chalk to put his or her personal mark on the captive's back." Nearly half a century later Fol confirmed that both male and female war-riors carried, "wound round their left wrist, a cord 60 cen-timeters lone for binding prisoners." .

Shields are mentioned so rarely that it is dear they were not standard equipment, at least not after the early eighteenth century, when Snelgrave reported that (male) warriors were all equipped with them. Even then, a soldier already had his hands full with musket and sword, his shield being borne by a boy apprentice 83 By Norris's time (1772),. some shields were just for show. He noted that the commander of 420 marching women, apparently a royal favorite, was screened from spectators by "long targets of leather, covered with red and blue taffata", held round her as she advanced." Forbes says that both the male and female army corps had shields ornamented with human skulls, and he and Beecroft watched women perform shield dances.85 Two amazon bucklers of the same kind were displayed for Skertchly." Burton saw two crimson leather ones held up by warrioresses in a royal entourage. He explained shields as "a remnant of the old days...now looked upon as a kind of aegis".87

Burton paints the most complete verbal picture of amazons setting off on a campaign: The privates carried packs on cradles...containing their bed-mats, clothes, and food for a week or a fortnight. [...] Cartridge-pouches of two different shapes were girt round their waists, and slung to their sides were water-gourds, fetish sacks, bullet-wallets, powder calabashes, fans, little cutlasses, wooden pipe-cases enveloped in leather tobacco-bags, flint, steel, and tinder, and Lilliputian stools, with three or four legs, cut out of single blocks. Their weapons were slung, and behind their backs dangled their hats, scarecrow felts, 'extinguishers' of white cotton useful as sacs de nuit, umbrellas of plaited palm leaf, and low-crowned, broad-brimmed, home-made straws, covered with bait more or less blue."

Униформа

If Dahomey's women soldiers were unique in precolonial Africa, having a permanent military organization was rare in itself and wearing uniforms even rarer. The typical army in neighboring lands was mobilized when needed and dis-banded when the fighting ended. Unexpectedly in ostensibly traditional, conformist societies, soldiers strove not to look alike but as different as possible. Identical dress was a European convention, and it is possible that Dahomey got the idea for military uniforms from watching behavior in the European forts at Whydah over a period of a century. Few European soldiers were stationed there, but African slaves of the forts did garrison duty.

Alternatively, liberated Brazilian slaves who began settling on the coast as early as the 1770s' and had contacts with the Dahomean government may have suggested the idea to Gezo. Or it could have been the celebrated Brazilian slave dealer Francisco Felix de Souza of Whydah, a longtime adviser to that monarch (and model for Bruce Chatwin's Viceroy of Ouidak). Exceptionally, Borghero speaks of `bfficets from Brazil" who introduced "the European element" into the Dahomean anny;2 if true, that might have included dress. One telling clue, however, suggests that the origins of Dahomean uniforms might be sought not in the southern port town but in the north. Some European visitors used aftie -Wcied rfor ithe I knee:lenith 'shorts worn' by both male and female soldiers in Dahomey.' The modem Yoruba word for trousers is sokoto, and the Fon word for shorts is cokota. In 1900 Yoruba men (but not women) living in what had become the French protectorate of Dahomey wore narrow knee-length trousers called chocoto.4 The clear im-plication is that pants reached the region from Sokoto, capital of the Fulani (or Fulbe) caliphate that dominated much of northern Nigeria and part of Yorubaland during the nineteenth century, and converted many Yoruba to Islam. The garment may have arrived earlier since Dalzel tells us that Dahomean men wore locally-made cotton "drawers" in the late eighteenth century.5

(Dahomey's links to the Muslim world actually go back much further than the Sokoto caliphate. BY the 1720s Muslim traders from the north called "Mallays" were familiar visitors to the country." The designation would seem to derive from the Arabic word mawla [mullah], meaning master or teacher, for these turbaned strangers carried Islam in their saddlebags. Conceivably they had some influence on Dahomey's military establishment.)

At any rate, there is no evidence for distinctive uniforms before Gezo. The four women musketeers that Snelgrave saw standing behind Agaja in 1727 "were finely dress'd from the middle downward, (the Custom of the Country being not to cover the Body upward, of either Sex)"' In Pruneau's time (1763-4), female soldiers wore only "a small silk pagne falling from the loins to the knees"!' (If it was really silk, the material could only have been imported, from either European slave ships on the coast or Muslim traders from the north.) Male soldiers, he said, also wore only a pagne, either of silk or cotton.° In the first published illustrations of the amazons, Dalzel (1793) shows them uncovered above the waist.'" And as late as 1830, i.e. twelve years into Gezo's reign, the slave-ship captain Augustin Lopez saw bare-breasted amazons at Abomey. (A hundred of them took part in the sort of mock attack that Father Borghero witnessed three decades later, except that live enemies, already tied to stakes, were captured and executed.)"

The tunic adopted in Gezo's time had nothing to do with modesty. Dahomean women routinely bared their breasts as a mark of deference, if indeed they were covered. Chaudoin, who took a lively interest in such details, noted that when women entered French commercial houses at Whydah, which legally belonged to the king of Dahomey, they stripped to the waist. They did likewise, he said, on presenting themselves to the Dahomean authorities or other dignitaries.12

Since male soldiers seem to have donned a tunic at the same time as the amazons, the covering-up may have been due simply to emulation of Fulani or European uniforms. Protection of sensitive bosoms from the rough and tumble of combat could have been a consideration. Or some value may have been seen in concealing feminine attributes from enemy warriors.

A modem historian of the amazons, AmElie Degbelo of the Republic of Benin, thinks "the major concem"in dressing them "was to hide their feminine nature". Their breasts, she says, were meant to be flattened, and their headgear had pointed side flaps to conceal the holes in their earlobes."

Wearing similar uniforms, bearing the same weapons and accessories, draped with ornaments and amulets, and covered with the grime of a long campaign, men and women soldiers were sometimes hard to tell apart. At a critical moment in one of Dahomey's great battles, the attack on the Yoruba city of Abeokuta in 1851 (chapter 17), the defenders were said to be unaware that women soldiers had been pushing them back until one was captured. Customarily the first prisoner was emasculated. When her sex was revealed, the Yoruba soldiers, feeling their manhood challenged, staged a furious and successful counterattack.

The first eyewitness account of amazon uniforms dates to 1843. Prefiguring the surprise discovery at Abeokuta, Freeman saw a "brigade" of several hundred warrioresses who "were dressed so much like men, that a stranger would not have supposed that they were women". They wore "a loose shirt without sleeves, which comes nearly down to their knees, and is fastened round the waist by their car-touch-belt". Either the uniform did not yet include pants, or more likely the missionary forgot to mention them."

Two years later Duncan noted the basic uniform that would serve the female soldiers during their last half-century: [These amazons...wear a blue and white striped cotton surtout [tunic or shirt], the stripes about one and a half inch wide, of stout native manufacture, without sleeves, leaving freedom for the arms... [It] reaches as low as the kilt of the Highlanders. A pair of short trowsers is worn underneath, reaching two inches below the knee. The cartouche-box...forms a girdle, and keeps all their dress snug and close.I5

One amazon "regiment" wore white cotton skullcaps bear-ing the image of a crocodile. Gezo told Duncan that some of his warrioresses had killed one in the bush during a campaign a few months earlier, and that "he had ordered the figure to be worn on the cap as a mark of distinction"'" — anticipating the Lacoste logo by more than a century. Forbes (1849-50) specified that the emblem was blue, and that each amazon "regiment" had its own, one a crocodile, another a cross, a third a crown." Burton (1863-4) saw silver sharks on red caps,'" Fol dark tortoises on gray-white caps." William Winniett, a British naval captain who visited Abomey in 1847, tells us Gezo "requested that Her Majesty [the young Queen Victoria]...kindly make him a present of 2,000 war-caps for his female troops, and She very kindly sent them to him"."

Sometimes the amazons wore headbands instead of caps, with the same devices sewn on; it was a simple example of applique, a decorative technique the Fon developed into an art.

Several authors mention sashes round the waist: red, blue or white, with or without the cartridge belt.

Duncan did not say what the amazons wore under their uniform. Burton, who missed very little, mentioned "a zone of beads, supporting a bandage" as the basic female garment?' Chaudoin researched the question toward 1890. Little girls in Dahomey, where temperatures rarely dipped below 20° C. (68° F.), wore only a string of beads round the waist day and night, and kept it on when they grew up. Daughters of the more affluent families added strings; Chaudoin says some wore up to ten rows of beads, made either of thick glass or coral. When the time came —which Herskovits deter-mined much later was between the ages of nine and eleven22 — they put a small piece of cloth between their legs, attached front and back to the beads. This remained the only female underwear? (Herskovits describes the first female garment as a small cloth that reached from the waist to just above the knees;' either he is inaccurate or it was an alternative fashion.)

Amazons actually had two uniforms, one to fight in, the other to parade in. Battledress tended toward somber colors: Bonet saw dark blue or "wood-colored" tunics and dark-colored headbands;25 Borghero rust-colored tunics;26 Burton "tunics of grey baft, stained brown with blood and barks", but white hair fillets and waist sashes?? Skertchly "a war-dress of grey, brown, or dark blue...[with] a white sash over the left shoulder"? Foa blue or "dingy white" war costumes with caps "originally white, but generally dark gray".29 The blue-and-white-striped tunics that Duncan described seem also to have been meant for war. Repin noticed shorts with the same pattern?" Bonet saw "companies" of amazon scouts covered with "freshly cut long grass"?' Burton "soldieresses in grass-cloth skirts".32

Parade dress was something else: brighter colors, finer fabrics, the addition of pagnes, a variety of headgear, each amazon unit striving to outdazzle the next. Tunics were red, or scarlet, or crimson, or green, or pale blue, or half-blue, half-red. Shorts were sometimes red or blue or multicolored. Materials included silks, velvets, chintzes and other Indian cottons. Knee-length or ankle-length pagnes covered or replaced the shorts, a jacket or vest replaced the long tunic. Burton saw amazons wearing "a sleeveless waistcoat of various, colours,...buttoning in front like that affected by Hausa Mos-ems. [A] loin wrapper [pagne], of dyed stuff, mostly blue, pink, and yellow, extended to the ankles."33 (The reference o the Hausa, the most numerous people of the Fulani empire, Skertchly spotted gray knee-length petticoats, "brown waist-- coats, with pink underskirts", "Prussian blue gowns" and crim-son or yellow or white crossbelts.34 Fol describes a sort of bodice above a skirt reaching mid-thigh.33 Vallon, echoed by Burton, says the youngest amazons, equipped with bows and arrows instead of guns, wore the scantiest attire, exposing thighs "tattooed" (elsewhere the Frenchman says "painted") to the knees.%

Besides skullcaps, Burton noted "scarlet woollen nightcaps" and, on officers, red "Liberty Caps". He saw "privates" parading with hats dangling on their backs: "scarecrow felts, 'extingui-shers' [shaped like candle snuffersl of white cotton ...and low-crowned, broad-brimmed, home-made straws" covered with blue material?' Boll& thought he saw red berets.38 In 1851 he gave Gezo fifty brass firemen's helmets with red plumes on behalf of the French government, and soon saw them polished to perfection and gleaming magnificently in the sun on fifty amazon heads.39 Two decades later Skertchly observed amazons wearing what may have been the same helmets.' In a rare eighteenth-century reference to amazon headgear, Norris watched a "troop of forty women, with silver helmets"." Vallon saw elephant huntresses wearing blue turbans adorned with the long herbivore horns that fooled their prey.42

Officers' parade dress was more opulent and at least as varied as that of the rank and file. Forbes saw gold embroidery on their tunics." In what seems to have been a reference to officers, Vallon wrote of "costumes resplendent with gold, silver, the richest silk materials"." Burton depicts one officer "in a man's straw hat, a green waistcoat, a white shirt, put on...c1 Penvers [bacicwardsj...a blue waistcloth, and a sash of white calico".4 Another wore "a vest, pink before and white behind, with a drooping slovenly collar: a black leather cartridge-belt kept in position her long blue striped waist-cloth."" Skertchly describes an officer in a violet-and-white-checked toga.°

Small silver horns were among officers' headgear in Bouet's time." Chaudoin noted a "chiefess" with gold horns." Burton saw "captainesses" parading with a "cook's bonnet...steeple-crowned broad-brims...shaggy skull-caps, like pepper-corn hair, stained a deep indigo...big fool's caps of stuffs striped white, blue, and red, and hanging over their shoulders". One officer had "a broad-brimmed and gold-laced hat, ap-parently beaver, upon a head swathed in calico"."

Hairstyles varied among amazon units and between the warrioresses and their officers. Many women soldiers, and men as well, shaved their heads completely, which doubtless made them look even more alike. Some left just a crest or cock's comb, some a big circular patch at the top, combed out like a brush, some one or two tufts. Others shaved only "a breadth of two inches from the forehead to the poll". And some had full heads of hair. Burton saw a "coloneless" with "her scalp...clean shaven and shining, a single little lock (holding] a silver knob like the finial of a tea-pot." Two "captainesses" were "silver half-heads", meaning that half their scalp was shaved, while the other half was covered with a silver half-helmet, a distinction that marked them as royal messengers. Some officers had dyed their hair a deep indigo, "which contrasted well with the silver ornaments". An amazon choral group had silver hair.