Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We've talked quite a bit about women in combat in various ways on the podcast before. We've told stories about individual women who disguised themselves as men to go to war at a time when women were not allowed to, like our Sarah Emma Edmund's episode. We've also talked about efforts to recruit women out of a specific and pretty dire need during wartime, like one of my very favorite episodes of ours, which is the one on the Night, which is We've also talked about women who could be described as warrior queens, like Budica or in the time of past host on the podcast Queen and Zinga. But today's topic is a little bit different. We are revisiting the Kingdom of home A which is now in Benin, which we talked about in our recent episode about its royal path Alice is. For most of its history, Dahomy employed women warriors, first as a palace guard and then as a combat fighting force. In this later form, these were probably the earliest full time professional female fighting units in history, especially considering the fact that they really were a combat force and not like a ceremonial one who sort of accompanied men to the battlefield but didn't actually do any fighting. The idea of an all female group of warriors who actually did fight was rare enough that when Europeans encountered them for the first time, they nicknamed them Amazons, after the figures in Greek mythology. These women had a reputation for just being beyond fierce. Some of them were known as reapers, and they fought with these three ft long razor blades. After mock battles and other military displays, ones who were particularly brave would be awarded with belts that were made of braided acacia branches, and these had these two inch long thorns all over them, and they would just put those on in front of their audience as though it was nothing. Even after most of these women had been killed in battle, European military leaders that they had been fighting spoke of them with a whole lot of reverence and respect. So let's who we're going to talk about today. But before we get into it, I need to give a note on the terms we're going to use. Unfortunately, we do not have a clear Dahomyan word to describe these women. At the time, they were called ajosi, which meant king's wives, but that same word was used to describe all of the women who were part of palace life, regardless of whether they were fighters or not. The same is true of the word mino, which meant our mothers, which was had the same basic connotation these were women who live in the palace. French speaking people in Benin today still use the French word for amazon's to talk about these women. And so even though this is basically a European word that was added into the language, it's the word we're going to go with because we just don't really have a better alternative. Yeah, it kind of sets the apart in a more distinctive way than any of the the native labels that would be applied there. There are many many historical accounts of dahom as women warriors, but because the Kingdom of dahome A had no written language before the arrival of Europeans, most of them are written from a distinctly European perspective. These written records are mostly also from the point of view of men. Many of them active and enthusiastic participants in the Transatlantic slave trade, which is what funded the kingdom and its army. So overall, the documentation that we have doesn't have a lot of insight into how these women came to be fighters, or how they were viewed by the rest of Dahoman society, and even how they viewed themselves. Even though the University Nacional du Benin later undertook significant oral history projects to document the nation's history, those projects all started after the women who had been Amazons, and likely anyone else who would have had firsthand contact with them, had eyed Consequently, it's a little bit unclear exactly when Dahoman kings started having female guards. However, the use of women as a king's guard stemmed directly from one aspect of Dahoman culture, so it's probably really early in the establishment of the kingdom. Basically, other than the king, men were not allowed to be in the palace walls when it was dark, so anybody guarding the king overnight needed to be a woman. More than likely the first women put to this task were some of the king's wives. They were trusted, they were connected directly to the king through social ties, and they were women so they could be in the palace at night. Dahoman kings had multiple wives, and a sort of third tier wife was married to him but not considered attractive enough to be physically intimate with him or bear his children, and some of these women, in their celibate marriage to the king were armed and then trained to guard him. Written accounts of these armed female guards go all the way back to the seventh teen twenties. We talk about the annual customs in the in the Palaces of Albumy episode and European descriptions of that festival also feature armed women as part of processionals and royal guards. The size of this guard was relatively small, about six hundred women total, and it seems to have been at this point back in the eighteenth century, largely related to guard duties and ceremonial presence. In seventeen twenty nine, King Agaja reportedly armed women and placed them at the rear of his fighting formations to make his numbers appear larger. However, it seems as though their role was not actually to fight, but just to give the illusion of greater strength. So the exact process by which the Amazon's morphed from a king's guard made up of his least attractive wives into a fighting force is a little bit muddled. There are several possible explanations for exactly what happened and when, and one of them is very simple. The Bajaman kingdom was small compared to some of its neighbors, and so it's possible that the Homemade just needed to recruit more soldiers to continue to expand its kingdom and defend itself, and since there weren't enough men to do this, they started also recruiting women. Another theory follows the same lines as we talked about in our recent episode about the Palaces of Aboumae. Each king was expected to expand the kingdom during its reign, and this meant that the Homemade was always at war. The consequent loss of life would mean that the kingdom really always needed more soldiers. Theory number three has to do with a royal coup. A Dan da Zan, who reigned from sevent to eighteen eighteen, was overthrown by his brother Guizo, and in the process nearly all of a Dan da Zan's female guards were killed. But they were so fierce in the battle, and so devoted to protecting the king that Guiso concluded they would be good as a real ongoing fighting force, not just as a palace guard. And of course, there is a story that's almost certainly apocryph fold that's in the mix, and this is also from the rain of Kinguizo to explain how this all started. Women hunters in Dahoma were known as beeto. In the mid nineteenth century, a French naval surgeon reported that a group of about twenty gbeto had attacked a herd of forty elephants, although several of them were killed or wounded. Guizo praised their bravery in having attacked such a large herd in the first place, and one of them replied that they'd enjoy a man hunt better, and Guizo decided to start recruiting women into his army. Regardless of exactly what prompted it all, the palace guard definitely did transform into a fighting force and got a lot bigger during the reign of Kinguizo, so much though, that he took credit for inventing the idea entirely, even though it seems like he was more morphing an idea that already existed into a permanent part of the standing Dahoman army, which would go on until Dahoma as a kingdom ended. Under Guizo, the Amazons grew from a force of about six hundred women to about six thousand. Guiso also started a tradition of wearing uniforms, which was a largely European convention that didn't exist in the Dahoman military before this point. Beginning in his reign, both men and women wore knee length pants and tunics, whereas previously there hadn't been one standard of dress and most of the women had fought bare chested. Post Guizo, the Amazon's also had two sets of uniforms, one that was fighting where and the other as a sort of parade dress. We'll talk about how these women were selected and trained once they were part of the standing army. After a brief word from one of the great sponsors who keep the show on the air, to return to the women who fought in Dahoman's army. Many of Dahomey's first Amazons were slaves from neighboring kingdoms who had been taken as prisoners of war. It was believed that they would have no ties to anyone into home who might want to overthrow the king, and so they were safer to have around as part of his his guards. Later, Dahomie and women were recruited or conscripted as well, some of them reportedly because they were of high enough status to be favored by the king, but not beautiful enough to actually be one of his wives. Regardless of how they came to be part of the army, the women were also expected to be celibate. They all effectively married the king and took a how of chastity. Infidelity was punishable by death, including for women who had been married or had children before they were conscripted. There were two reasons for this, first, so that the women's loyalty to the king would not be divided, and seconds so military service would not be interrupted by pregnancies and births. A lot of European writing about these women and their relationships, including whether they had physical relationships with each other or whether they broke their vows of chastity, is really based on conjecture, and they are also varying accounts of how they and others viewed their own gender. Some accounts described the amazon's being viewed as male after they had killed someone in battle. Others described the Amazon's viewing themselves as male once they had been recruited, but all of this is kind of hazy. As part of the army, Amazons were definitely given preferential treatment over the typical non royal women of dahome A, whose lives revolved around growing crops, tending to household tasks, and raising their children. The Amazons were given slaves, possibly as many as fifty for each Amazon, although that number is based on Sir Richard Richard Burton's account, so there's just a maybe there. We don't know about the veracity of that statement. When outside the palace, a slave girl ringing a bell walked ahead of the Amazon's, warning men in the area to both get out of the way and to avert their eyes. As a fighting force, the Amazons followed the same basic pattern as Dahomey's male army, which was divided into left, center, and right wings with a rear guard. The king commanded the center wing until the king stopped personally taking the field in battle, and then the left and right wings were commanded by two of his highest ranking chiefs. In terms of the Amazon's the center was the king's personal guard and the left and right wings were fighting forces who fell under commands of the other chiefs. When going into battle, the Amazon units would fall in with their corresponding mail units. Amazons were armed with muskets, short swords, knives, and clubs. Most of the muskets were obtained through the slave trade, and some of them were intentionally faulty. However, the people of Dahoma became quite adept at repairing them, and those that weren't reparable were still carried so that the army could maintain this appearance of being incredibly well armed. Some also fought with bows and poisoned arrows. We talk a lot more about Dahomey's role in the Transatlantic slade trade and the other episode that we keep mentioning or not going to rehash it all here, but basically, uh, the Kingdom of Dahoma was often paid for slaves with weapons, and a lot of times the weapons that were used as payment were deliberately broken, so they got very good at fixing them. As the Amazons evolved from being a palace guard to being a true fighting force, the women started undergoing really extensive training. A lot of it was inherently painful and dangerous and meant to desensitize them both the physical pain and to being around a lot of death. They climbed acacia walls, which were covered in huge thorns, usually doing this with bare hands and feet. They underwent extensive survival training, including field testing, in which they were sent into the wilderness without a whole lot in the way of either food or protection. In terms of desensitizing these Amazons to death, they participated in ceremonies in which they were made to kill prisoners of war, or to witness executions, or to perform these executions themselves. The women most often put through this were normally the youngest recruits, who had little exposure to violence or death. Yet all these aspects of the Amazon's training, combined with exhibitions that were put on for visiting African and European leaders, to give the Amazons an extremely fierce reputation. Even before they took to the field of battle. These women were widely viewed as brave and determined to the point of being ruthless. This element of fear was as much a part of their reason for being as their actual existence as a fighting force. As the words spread that Dahomey had this fighting force of women who climbed walls of thorns in their bare feet or swung giant razor blades in combat. They bring tribes and kingdoms became a little more wary of them, like you would, you know, a rumor of a bunch of women swinging giant razor blades would be enough to keep me away, frankly, and this was the case as well for European visitors and later colonists and conquerors in Africa as well, although virtually every European fighting force was better armed than the Amazons, meaning that Europeans who did meet them in battle, generally one European accounts have a generally admiring tone about this whole fighting force. Explorer John Duncan, who visited the area in the mid nineteenth century, wrote of them, saying, quote, their appearance is more martial than the generality of men, and if undertaking a campaign, I would prefer the females to the male soldiers of this country. Commoner Wilmot described them in his dispatches as quote far superior to the men in everything, in appearance and dress and figure, and activity, and their performance as soldiers and in bravery Richard Burton wrote of there being better shots who fired from the shoulder rather than the hip as the men did, and faster to reload than their male counterparts. But like the Dahoman Kingdom, the fighting force of Amazons did not last forever, and we will talk about that more after another brief word from sponsor. The Dahoman Kingdom started to lose some of its power in the mid to late eighteen hundreds with the decline and eventual abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade and some attempted conquests of neighboring territory that went in their enemies favor. Many Dahoman fighters, both male and female, were also killed in two different sailed attempts to overthrow the Eggba capital capital of a Bayo Kuta, the first in eighteen fifty one and the second in eighteen sixty four. One attack was probably the peak of the Amazon's military strength and their reputation in battle. Baya Kuta was large, About fifty thou people lived there and it was surrounded by a wall that made it easy to defend reports about exact numbers conflict, but there were as many as five thousand Amazons fighting for Dahoma at the time, and roughly a fifth of them were killed in this battle. Then, during the rule of King Behanzan, France started trying to annex the land that was occupied by Dahomy Zahoma, apparently trying to drive the French out, tacked a village that had come under French control in eighteen eighty nine, when the chief of the village said that the French flag would protect them, presumably because the French had promised protection when taking control of the village, The general who was attacking the village said, so you like this flag and be it. It will serve you. Then one of the Amazon's beheaded. The chief wrapped his head in the flag and carried it back to behind en all out war with France immediately followed. France's weapons were superior to the Dahoman army, so during fighting that went on from eight casualties on the Dahoman side were very high. Of the roughly one thousand, five hundred women still serving in the Dahoman army, fewer than fifty were both alive and physically able to continue fighting. By the time France officially took control. France conquered Dahoman, there was a trend at this point in history for a quote ethnographic showcase races to be part of world's fairs and other large public exhibitions. These showcases would include recreations of of places from around the world, populated with people purported to be front of these places. Generally, the world's largest colonial powers were the ones hosting these world's fairs and exhibitions, and the people on exhibit were from territory they had conquered a colonize. Several of these exhibits between the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties included women who were described as Amazons, although whether they genuinely were women fighters from Dahomy is pretty suspect. The first of these displays was at a showcase at the Gaudin Daclamttion in Paris, not long after the war between France and Dahomey ended. As another example, in nineteen o nine, a quote village from Dahomey was recreated as part of the Imperial International Exhibition, a world's fair that took place in London. The Amazons that were displayed there toured in other exhibitions throughout Europe, where, in addition to being show pieces, they would participate in simulated fights, and in these exhibitions, Dahomey's women fighters were depicted as vicious and barbaric, and as a good example of what one might find if they visited the so called quote Dark Continent. A woman named Nawi, who was reported to be the last living Amazon of Dahomy, died in November of ninety nine, twenty one years after Benin had finally become independent from France. She claims to have fought against the French and eight two and that's the Amazons of Dahomy. It is a really fascinating story. There are so few historical accounts of full women's forces, but the ones that uh, we do talk about and that exists in the historic record never ceased to just completely capture my attention. UH. In the meantime, do you have a bit of listener mail for us to enjoy? So the mail I have us from Christine who talks about how she's recently been catching up on episodes like our Child Migrant Program episode and the what about the King's Daughter ers. She says, these topics remind me a lot of early American context, and it's been so delightful and informative to hear about France, Canada, Britten, Australia, et cetera as well. What these podcasts are calling to my mind is the genesis of American colonial history. I teach an undergrad race and American Politics class, and my students this term got super interested in how the problem of quote population in England in part prompted the colonization of the quote New World. As historians like Edmund Morgan and others tell it, England was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries suffering a population boom without an economic growth to match. This resulted in several efforts by Parliament to contain what was suddenly a rather problematic population of destitute labors without work. They built workhouses and hospitals to house many, stowed away others in prisons, and sent still more to the gallows. But unlike these efforts, colonization allowed England to achieve two things at once. First, that helped curtail the population problem by sending their conflicts, their poor, and their riff raff away to the New World as settlers and laborers. Second, and just as importantly, and fulfilled dreams of empire that we're starting to take root in British thought. In the American colonial context, the arrival of masses of indentured servants from England predated the arrival of masses of slaves from Africa for the simple reason that this helped solve some serious pro poverty problems for Parliament while enriching the British Empire. It was only later that colonies like Virginia turns to chattel slavery as the primary source of unpaid labor. After it turns out insurgencies like Bacon's Rebellion outlined for the colonists the dangers of indentured servants outliving their servitude and roaming the frontier again, poor, restless, relatively young, without work and armed. Apologies for the long note. Never apologize for your long notes, folks. Uh. It has been so interesting to hear about programs like the Child Migrant Program because it reminds us the issues of population, settlement and sometimes full scale colonization are all wrapped up in each other and they can have incredible ripple effects throughout history on race, gender, youth, etcetera. Thanks for your interesting podcasts of late best Cursed Thin. I wanted to read this for a couple of reasons. One is that we we talked about, um, a lot of the population boom in in Britain and what it was leading to in our episode on The Lady Juliana, so that, like, that's not totally new territory for the podcast. But we've never really talked about the fact that a lot of the first people who were sent to uh, the American colonies from Britain were indentured servants and that that was the primary form of unpaid labor until the slave trade really reached North America. It was already reaching South America long before it made its way into North America. UM. So yeah, I thought that was a good a good time to be able to note that. So thank you so much Christine for sending us this note. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in History and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're also on Pinterest at pentterest dot com slash missed in History. If you would like to learn more about all kinds of different historical things. Come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com, has all kinds of information about all kinds of stuff. You can also come to our website, which is missed in History dot com to find an ar guy that every episode we've ever done, and show notes from the episodes that Holly and I have done, and various other cool things. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history. 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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We've talked quite a bit about women in combat in various ways on the podcast before. We've told stories about individual women who disguised themselves as men to go to war at a time when women were not allowed to, like our Sarah Emma Edmund's episode. We've also talked about efforts to recruit women out of a specific and pretty dire need during wartime, like one of my very favorite episodes of ours, which is the one on the Night, which is We've also talked about women who could be described as warrior queens, like Budica or in the time of past host on the podcast Queen and Zinga. But today's topic is a little bit different. We are revisiting the Kingdom of home A which is now in Benin, which we talked about in our recent episode about its royal path Alice is. For most of its history, Dahomy employed women warriors, first as a palace guard and then as a combat fighting force. In this later form, these were probably the earliest full time professional female fighting units in history, especially considering the fact that they really were a combat force and not like a ceremonial one who sort of accompanied men to the battlefield but didn't actually do any fighting. The idea of an all female group of warriors who actually did fight was rare enough that when Europeans encountered them for the first time, they nicknamed them Amazons, after the figures in Greek mythology. These women had a reputation for just being beyond fierce. Some of them were known as reapers, and they fought with these three ft long razor blades. After mock battles and other military displays, ones who were particularly brave would be awarded with belts that were made of braided acacia branches, and these had these two inch long thorns all over them, and they would just put those on in front of their audience as though it was nothing. Even after most of these women had been killed in battle, European military leaders that they had been fighting spoke of them with a whole lot of reverence and respect. So let's who we're going to talk about today. But before we get into it, I need to give a note on the terms we're going to use. Unfortunately, we do not have a clear Dahomyan word to describe these women. At the time, they were called ajosi, which meant king's wives, but that same word was used to describe all of the women who were part of palace life, regardless of whether they were fighters or not. The same is true of the word mino, which meant our mothers, which was had the same basic connotation these were women who live in the palace. French speaking people in Benin today still use the French word for amazon's to talk about these women. And so even though this is basically a European word that was added into the language, it's the word we're going to go with because we just don't really have a better alternative. Yeah, it kind of sets the apart in a more distinctive way than any of the the native labels that would be applied there. There are many many historical accounts of dahom as women warriors, but because the Kingdom of dahome A had no written language before the arrival of Europeans, most of them are written from a distinctly European perspective. These written records are mostly also from the point of view of men. Many of them active and enthusiastic participants in the Transatlantic slave trade, which is what funded the kingdom and its army. So overall, the documentation that we have doesn't have a lot of insight into how these women came to be fighters, or how they were viewed by the rest of Dahoman society, and even how they viewed themselves. Even though the University Nacional du Benin later undertook significant oral history projects to document the nation's history, those projects all started after the women who had been Amazons, and likely anyone else who would have had firsthand contact with them, had eyed Consequently, it's a little bit unclear exactly when Dahoman kings started having female guards. However, the use of women as a king's guard stemmed directly from one aspect of Dahoman culture, so it's probably really early in the establishment of the kingdom. Basically, other than the king, men were not allowed to be in the palace walls when it was dark, so anybody guarding the king overnight needed to be a woman. More than likely the first women put to this task were some of the king's wives. They were trusted, they were connected directly to the king through social ties, and they were women so they could be in the palace at night. Dahoman kings had multiple wives, and a sort of third tier wife was married to him but not considered attractive enough to be physically intimate with him or bear his children, and some of these women, in their celibate marriage to the king were armed and then trained to guard him. Written accounts of these armed female guards go all the way back to the seventh teen twenties. We talk about the annual customs in the in the Palaces of Albumy episode and European descriptions of that festival also feature armed women as part of processionals and royal guards. The size of this guard was relatively small, about six hundred women total, and it seems to have been at this point back in the eighteenth century, largely related to guard duties and ceremonial presence. In seventeen twenty nine, King Agaja reportedly armed women and placed them at the rear of his fighting formations to make his numbers appear larger. However, it seems as though their role was not actually to fight, but just to give the illusion of greater strength. So the exact process by which the Amazon's morphed from a king's guard made up of his least attractive wives into a fighting force is a little bit muddled. There are several possible explanations for exactly what happened and when, and one of them is very simple. The Bajaman kingdom was small compared to some of its neighbors, and so it's possible that the Homemade just needed to recruit more soldiers to continue to expand its kingdom and defend itself, and since there weren't enough men to do this, they started also recruiting women. Another theory follows the same lines as we talked about in our recent episode about the Palaces of Aboumae. Each king was expected to expand the kingdom during its reign, and this meant that the Homemade was always at war. The consequent loss of life would mean that the kingdom really always needed more soldiers. Theory number three has to do with a royal coup. A Dan da Zan, who reigned from sevent to eighteen eighteen, was overthrown by his brother Guizo, and in the process nearly all of a Dan da Zan's female guards were killed. But they were so fierce in the battle, and so devoted to protecting the king that Guiso concluded they would be good as a real ongoing fighting force, not just as a palace guard. And of course, there is a story that's almost certainly apocryph fold that's in the mix, and this is also from the rain of Kinguizo to explain how this all started. Women hunters in Dahoma were known as beeto. In the mid nineteenth century, a French naval surgeon reported that a group of about twenty gbeto had attacked a herd of forty elephants, although several of them were killed or wounded. Guizo praised their bravery in having attacked such a large herd in the first place, and one of them replied that they'd enjoy a man hunt better, and Guizo decided to start recruiting women into his army. Regardless of exactly what prompted it all, the palace guard definitely did transform into a fighting force and got a lot bigger during the reign of Kinguizo, so much though, that he took credit for inventing the idea entirely, even though it seems like he was more morphing an idea that already existed into a permanent part of the standing Dahoman army, which would go on until Dahoma as a kingdom ended. Under Guizo, the Amazons grew from a force of about six hundred women to about six thousand. Guiso also started a tradition of wearing uniforms, which was a largely European convention that didn't exist in the Dahoman military before this point. Beginning in his reign, both men and women wore knee length pants and tunics, whereas previously there hadn't been one standard of dress and most of the women had fought bare chested. Post Guizo, the Amazon's also had two sets of uniforms, one that was fighting where and the other as a sort of parade dress. We'll talk about how these women were selected and trained once they were part of the standing army. After a brief word from one of the great sponsors who keep the show on the air, to return to the women who fought in Dahoman's army. Many of Dahomey's first Amazons were slaves from neighboring kingdoms who had been taken as prisoners of war. It was believed that they would have no ties to anyone into home who might want to overthrow the king, and so they were safer to have around as part of his his guards. Later, Dahomie and women were recruited or conscripted as well, some of them reportedly because they were of high enough status to be favored by the king, but not beautiful enough to actually be one of his wives. Regardless of how they came to be part of the army, the women were also expected to be celibate. They all effectively married the king and took a how of chastity. Infidelity was punishable by death, including for women who had been married or had children before they were conscripted. There were two reasons for this, first, so that the women's loyalty to the king would not be divided, and seconds so military service would not be interrupted by pregnancies and births. A lot of European writing about these women and their relationships, including whether they had physical relationships with each other or whether they broke their vows of chastity, is really based on conjecture, and they are also varying accounts of how they and others viewed their own gender. Some accounts described the amazon's being viewed as male after they had killed someone in battle. Others described the Amazon's viewing themselves as male once they had been recruited, but all of this is kind of hazy. As part of the army, Amazons were definitely given preferential treatment over the typical non royal women of dahome A, whose lives revolved around growing crops, tending to household tasks, and raising their children. The Amazons were given slaves, possibly as many as fifty for each Amazon, although that number is based on Sir Richard Richard Burton's account, so there's just a maybe there. We don't know about the veracity of that statement. When outside the palace, a slave girl ringing a bell walked ahead of the Amazon's, warning men in the area to both get out of the way and to avert their eyes. As a fighting force, the Amazons followed the same basic pattern as Dahomey's male army, which was divided into left, center, and right wings with a rear guard. The king commanded the center wing until the king stopped personally taking the field in battle, and then the left and right wings were commanded by two of his highest ranking chiefs. In terms of the Amazon's the center was the king's personal guard and the left and right wings were fighting forces who fell under commands of the other chiefs. When going into battle, the Amazon units would fall in with their corresponding mail units. Amazons were armed with muskets, short swords, knives, and clubs. Most of the muskets were obtained through the slave trade, and some of them were intentionally faulty. However, the people of Dahoma became quite adept at repairing them, and those that weren't reparable were still carried so that the army could maintain this appearance of being incredibly well armed. Some also fought with bows and poisoned arrows. We talk a lot more about Dahomey's role in the Transatlantic slade trade and the other episode that we keep mentioning or not going to rehash it all here, but basically, uh, the Kingdom of Dahoma was often paid for slaves with weapons, and a lot of times the weapons that were used as payment were deliberately broken, so they got very good at fixing them. As the Amazons evolved from being a palace guard to being a true fighting force, the women started undergoing really extensive training. A lot of it was inherently painful and dangerous and meant to desensitize them both the physical pain and to being around a lot of death. They climbed acacia walls, which were covered in huge thorns, usually doing this with bare hands and feet. They underwent extensive survival training, including field testing, in which they were sent into the wilderness without a whole lot in the way of either food or protection. In terms of desensitizing these Amazons to death, they participated in ceremonies in which they were made to kill prisoners of war, or to witness executions, or to perform these executions themselves. The women most often put through this were normally the youngest recruits, who had little exposure to violence or death. Yet all these aspects of the Amazon's training, combined with exhibitions that were put on for visiting African and European leaders, to give the Amazons an extremely fierce reputation. Even before they took to the field of battle. These women were widely viewed as brave and determined to the point of being ruthless. This element of fear was as much a part of their reason for being as their actual existence as a fighting force. As the words spread that Dahomey had this fighting force of women who climbed walls of thorns in their bare feet or swung giant razor blades in combat. They bring tribes and kingdoms became a little more wary of them, like you would, you know, a rumor of a bunch of women swinging giant razor blades would be enough to keep me away, frankly, and this was the case as well for European visitors and later colonists and conquerors in Africa as well, although virtually every European fighting force was better armed than the Amazons, meaning that Europeans who did meet them in battle, generally one European accounts have a generally admiring tone about this whole fighting force. Explorer John Duncan, who visited the area in the mid nineteenth century, wrote of them, saying, quote, their appearance is more martial than the generality of men, and if undertaking a campaign, I would prefer the females to the male soldiers of this country. Commoner Wilmot described them in his dispatches as quote far superior to the men in everything, in appearance and dress and figure, and activity, and their performance as soldiers and in bravery Richard Burton wrote of there being better shots who fired from the shoulder rather than the hip as the men did, and faster to reload than their male counterparts. But like the Dahoman Kingdom, the fighting force of Amazons did not last forever, and we will talk about that more after another brief word from sponsor. The Dahoman Kingdom started to lose some of its power in the mid to late eighteen hundreds with the decline and eventual abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade and some attempted conquests of neighboring territory that went in their enemies favor. Many Dahoman fighters, both male and female, were also killed in two different sailed attempts to overthrow the Eggba capital capital of a Bayo Kuta, the first in eighteen fifty one and the second in eighteen sixty four. One attack was probably the peak of the Amazon's military strength and their reputation in battle. Baya Kuta was large, About fifty thou people lived there and it was surrounded by a wall that made it easy to defend reports about exact numbers conflict, but there were as many as five thousand Amazons fighting for Dahoma at the time, and roughly a fifth of them were killed in this battle. Then, during the rule of King Behanzan, France started trying to annex the land that was occupied by Dahomy Zahoma, apparently trying to drive the French out, tacked a village that had come under French control in eighteen eighty nine, when the chief of the village said that the French flag would protect them, presumably because the French had promised protection when taking control of the village, The general who was attacking the village said, so you like this flag and be it. It will serve you. Then one of the Amazon's beheaded. The chief wrapped his head in the flag and carried it back to behind en all out war with France immediately followed. France's weapons were superior to the Dahoman army, so during fighting that went on from eight casualties on the Dahoman side were very high. Of the roughly one thousand, five hundred women still serving in the Dahoman army, fewer than fifty were both alive and physically able to continue fighting. By the time France officially took control. France conquered Dahoman, there was a trend at this point in history for a quote ethnographic showcase races to be part of world's fairs and other large public exhibitions. These showcases would include recreations of of places from around the world, populated with people purported to be front of these places. Generally, the world's largest colonial powers were the ones hosting these world's fairs and exhibitions, and the people on exhibit were from territory they had conquered a colonize. Several of these exhibits between the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties included women who were described as Amazons, although whether they genuinely were women fighters from Dahomy is pretty suspect. The first of these displays was at a showcase at the Gaudin Daclamttion in Paris, not long after the war between France and Dahomey ended. As another example, in nineteen o nine, a quote village from Dahomey was recreated as part of the Imperial International Exhibition, a world's fair that took place in London. The Amazons that were displayed there toured in other exhibitions throughout Europe, where, in addition to being show pieces, they would participate in simulated fights, and in these exhibitions, Dahomey's women fighters were depicted as vicious and barbaric, and as a good example of what one might find if they visited the so called quote Dark Continent. A woman named Nawi, who was reported to be the last living Amazon of Dahomy, died in November of ninety nine, twenty one years after Benin had finally become independent from France. She claims to have fought against the French and eight two and that's the Amazons of Dahomy. It is a really fascinating story. There are so few historical accounts of full women's forces, but the ones that uh, we do talk about and that exists in the historic record never ceased to just completely capture my attention. UH. In the meantime, do you have a bit of listener mail for us to enjoy? So the mail I have us from Christine who talks about how she's recently been catching up on episodes like our Child Migrant Program episode and the what about the King's Daughter ers. She says, these topics remind me a lot of early American context, and it's been so delightful and informative to hear about France, Canada, Britten, Australia, et cetera as well. What these podcasts are calling to my mind is the genesis of American colonial history. I teach an undergrad race and American Politics class, and my students this term got super interested in how the problem of quote population in England in part prompted the colonization of the quote New World. As historians like Edmund Morgan and others tell it, England was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries suffering a population boom without an economic growth to match. This resulted in several efforts by Parliament to contain what was suddenly a rather problematic population of destitute labors without work. They built workhouses and hospitals to house many, stowed away others in prisons, and sent still more to the gallows. But unlike these efforts, colonization allowed England to achieve two things at once. First, that helped curtail the population problem by sending their conflicts, their poor, and their riff raff away to the New World as settlers and laborers. Second, and just as importantly, and fulfilled dreams of empire that we're starting to take root in British thought. In the American colonial context, the arrival of masses of indentured servants from England predated the arrival of masses of slaves from Africa for the simple reason that this helped solve some serious pro poverty problems for Parliament while enriching the British Empire. It was only later that colonies like Virginia turns to chattel slavery as the primary source of unpaid labor. After it turns out insurgencies like Bacon's Rebellion outlined for the colonists the dangers of indentured servants outliving their servitude and roaming the frontier again, poor, restless, relatively young, without work and armed. Apologies for the long note. Never apologize for your long notes, folks. Uh. It has been so interesting to hear about programs like the Child Migrant Program because it reminds us the issues of population, settlement and sometimes full scale colonization are all wrapped up in each other and they can have incredible ripple effects throughout history on race, gender, youth, etcetera. Thanks for your interesting podcasts of late best Cursed Thin. I wanted to read this for a couple of reasons. One is that we we talked about, um, a lot of the population boom in in Britain and what it was leading to in our episode on The Lady Juliana, so that, like, that's not totally new territory for the podcast. But we've never really talked about the fact that a lot of the first people who were sent to uh, the American colonies from Britain were indentured servants and that that was the primary form of unpaid labor until the slave trade really reached North America. It was already reaching South America long before it made its way into North America. UM. So yeah, I thought that was a good a good time to be able to note that. So thank you so much Christine for sending us this note. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in History and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're also on Pinterest at pentterest dot com slash missed in History. If you would like to learn more about all kinds of different historical things. Come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com, has all kinds of information about all kinds of stuff. You can also come to our website, which is missed in History dot com to find an ar guy that every episode we've ever done, and show notes from the episodes that Holly and I have done, and various other cool things. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history. 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