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ZANZIBAR.

VOL. I.

ANCIENT TOMB AT TONGO-NI.

ZANZIBAR:
CITY, ISLAND, AND COAST.

BY

RICHARD F. BURTON.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE ST., STRAND.

1872.

[All Rights reserved.]

JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.

TO

THE MEMORY OF MY OLD AND LAMENTED FRIEND,

John Frederick Steinhaeuser

(F.R.C.S., ETC. ETC., STAFF SURGEON, BOMBAY ARMY),

THIS NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY,

IN WHICH FATE PREVENTED HIS TAKING PART,

IS INSCRIBED

WITH THE DEEPEST FEELINGS OF AFFECTION AND REGRET.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

PREFACE.

I feel that the reader will expect some allusion to the circumstances which have delayed, till 1871, the publication of a journal ready to appear in 1860. The following letter will explain the recovery of a long report, forwarded by me in 1857, under an address, very legibly written in ink, upon its cover, to the late Dr Norton Shaw, then Secretary Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain.

‘No. 9, of 1865.

‘General Department,

Bombay Castle, 28th February, 1865.

‘To

The Under Secretary of State for India,

London.

‘Sir,

No. 9, A.

The Secretary

R. Geog. Society,

Whitehall Place,

London.

With reference to the packet addressed, as per margin, which was sent to you viâ Southampton from the Separate Department, by the Overland Mail of the 14th instant, I have the honour to subjoin for your information copy of a note on the subject from the Hon. W. E. Frere, dated the 5th idem.

‘When searching the strong box belonging to the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society yesterday I found the accompanying parcel, directed to the Secretary Royal Geographical Society, with a pencil note upon it, requesting that it might be sent to the Secretary of State, Foreign Office. From the signature in the corner, R. F. B., I conclude that it must be the manuscript he sent to Colonel Rigby at Zanzibar, and which, from some statements of Mr Burton (to which I cannot at present refer, but of which I have a clear recollection), never reached its destination.[^[1]]

‘I have not been able to discover when or how the parcel was received, nor how the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society was to send it to the Foreign Office, except through Government. I therefore send it to you, and perhaps you would send it to the Under Secretary at the India House, with the above explanation, and request that it be sent to its direction.

I have, &c.,

(Signed) C. Ravenscroft,

Acting Chief Secretary to Government.’

* * * * * * *

It is not a little curious that, as my first report upon the subject of Zanzibar was diverted from its destination, so the ‘Letts’ containing my excursions to Sa’adani and to Kilwa also came to temporary grief. Annexed by a skipper on the West African coast, appropriated by his widow, and exposed at a London bookseller’s stall (labelled outside, ‘Burton Original MS. Diary in Africa’), it was accidentally left by the buyer, an English Artillery officer, in the hall of one of H. M.’s Ministers of State. Here being recognized, it was kindly and courteously returned to me. The meteorological observations made by me on the East African seaboard and at other places during the discovery of the Lakes were also, I would remark, mislaid for years, deep hidden in certain pigeon-holes at Whitehall Place. May these three accidents be typical of the fate of my East African Expedition, which, so long the victim of uncontrollable circumstance, appears now, after many weary years, likely to emerge from the shadow which overcast it, and to occupy the position which I ever desired to see it conquer.

The two old documents are published with the less compunction as Zanzibar, though increasing in importance and now the head-quarters of an Admiralty Court and of two Mission-Schools, with a printing-press and other civilized appliances, has not of late been worked out. The best authorities are still those who appeared about a quarter of a century ago, always excepting, however, the four magnificent volumes, Baron Carl Clare von der Decken’s Reisen in Ost-Afrika, in den Jahren 1859 bis 1861, which I first saw at Jerusalem: there too I had the pleasure of making acquaintance with Dr Otto Kersten, who accompanied the unfortunate traveller during the earlier portion of his peregrinations, and who has so ably and efficiently performed his part as editor. Had a certain publisher carried out his expressed intention of introducing a resumé of this fine work in English dress to the British public, I should have saved myself the trouble of writing these volumes: the Reisen, however, in the original form are hardly likely to become popular. Moreover, the long interval of a decade has borne fruit: it has given me time to work out the subject, and, better still, to write with calmness and temper upon a theme of the most temper-trying nature,—chap. xii. vol. II. will explain what is meant. Finally, I have something important to say upon the subject of the so-called Victoria Nyanza Lake.

I had proposed to enrich the Appendix with extracts from Arab and other mediæval authors, who have treated of Zanzibar, Island and Coast. Such an addition, however, would destroy all proportion between the book and its subject: I have therefore confined myself to notes on commerce and tariffs of prices in 1857 to 1859, to meteorological observations, and to Capt. Smee’s coasting voyage, which dates from January, 1811. The latter will supply an excellent birds-eye view of those parts of the Zanzibar mainland which were not visited by the East African Expedition.

Richard F. Burton.

London, Oct. 15, 1871.

ZANZIBAR.

PART I.
THE CITY AND THE ISLAND.

‘Of a territory within a fortnight’s sail of us, we scarcely know more than we do of much of Central Africa, infinitely less than we do of the shores of the Icy Sea.’—Trans. Bombay Geog. Soc., vol. xii.

‘Si fueris sapiens, sapientibus utere factis,

Si ignarus mordax, utere dente tuo.’

Fr. João de Sant’ Angelo.

Zanzibar.
(ISLAND & COAST)
London, Tinsley Brothers.

ZANZIBAR.

CHAPTER I.
PREPARATIONS FOR DEPARTURE.

‘We were now landed upon the Continent of Africa, the most desolate, desert, and inhospitable country in the world, even Greenland and Nova Zembla itself not excepted.’—Defoe.

I could not have believed, before Experience taught me, how sad and solemn is the moment when a man sits down to think over and to write out the tale of what was before the last Decade began. How many thoughts and memories crowd upon the mind! How many ghosts and phantoms start up from the brain—the shreds of hopes destroyed and of aims made futile; of ends accomplished and of prizes won; the failures and the successes alike half forgotten! How many loves and friendships have waxed cold in the presence of new ties! How many graves have closed over their dead during those short ten years—that epitome of the past!

‘And when the lesson strikes the head,

The weary heart grows cold.’

* * * * * *

The result of a skirmish with the Somal of Berberah (April 19, 1855) was, in my case, a visit ‘on sick leave’ to England. Arrived there, I lost no time in recovering health, and in volunteering for active Crimean service. The campaign, however, was but too advanced; all ‘appointments’ at head-quarters had been filled up; and new comers, such as I was, could look only to the ‘Bashi Buzuks,’ or to the ‘Turkish Contingent.’

My choice was readily made. There was, indeed, no comparison between serving under Major-General W. F. Beatson, an experienced Light-Cavalry man who had seen rough work in the saddle from Spain to Eastern Hindustan; and under an individual, half-civilian, half-reformed Adjutant-General, whose specialty was, and ever had been, foolscap—literally and metaphorically.

In due time I found myself at the Dardanelles, Chief of Staff in that thoroughly well-abused corps, the Bashi Buzuks. It were ‘actum agere’ to inflict upon the reader a réchauffé of our troubles,—how the military world declared us to be a band of banditti, an irreclaimable savagery; how a man, who then called himself H. B. M.’s Consul—but who has long since incurred the just consequences of his misconduct—packed the press, because General Beatson had refused him a lucrative contract; how we awoke one fine morning to find ourselves in a famous state of siege and blockade, with Turkish muskets on the land side, and with British carronades on the water-front; and how finally we, far more sinned against than sinning, were reported by Mr Consul Calvert to Constantinople as being in a furor of mutiny, intent upon battle and murder and sudden death. These things, and many other too personal for this occasion, will fit better into an autobiography.

The way, however, in which I ‘came to grief’ (permit me the phrase) deserves present and instant record: it is an admirable comment upon the now universally accepted axiom, ‘surtout, pas de zèle,’ and upon the Citizen-king’s warning words, ‘Surtout, ne me faites pas des affaires.’

The Bashi Buzuks, some 3000 sabres, almost all well mounted and better armed, were pertinaciously kept pitched on a bare hill-side, far from the scene of action and close to the Dardanelles country town, that gay and lively Turkish Coventry, at the Hellespont-mouth. In an evil hour I proposed, if my General, who wanted nothing better, would allow me, to proceed in person to Constantinople and to volunteer officially for the relief of the doomed city, Kars.

Ah, Corydon, Corydon, quæ te dementia cepit?

And I did proceed to Stamb’ul; and I did volunteer; and a neat hit, indeed, was that same public-spirited proceeding!

It would be a lively imagination that could conceive the scene of storm which resulted from my brazen-faced procedure. The picture has its comic side when looked back upon through the mellowing medium of three long lustres. The hopeful eagerness of the volunteer; the ‘proper pride’ in one’s corps, that had come forward for an honourable action; the fluent proof that we could convoy rations enough for the gallant and deserted Ottoman garrison, diplomatically left for months to slow death by starvation; and—the blank and stunned surprise at the hurricane of wrath which burst from the high authority to whose ambassadorial ear the project was entrusted.

Reported home as a ‘brouillon’ and turbulent, I again turned lovingly towards Africa—Central and Intertropical—and on April 19, 1856, I resolved to renew my original design of reaching the unknown regions, and of striking the Nile-sources viâ the Eastern coast. For long ages, I knew, explorers had been working, literally, as well as figuratively, against the stream; and, as the ancients had succeeded by a flank march, so the same might be done by us moderns. My Ptolemy told me the tale in very plain and emphatic terms, and although his shore-line shows great inaccuracies, his traditions of the interior, derived from mariners of Tyre and from older writers, appeared far more reliable:—

‘He (scil. the Tyrian) says that a certain Diogenes, one of those sailing to India, ... having the Troglyditic region on the right, after 25 days reached the Lakes whence the Nilus flows, and of which the Promontory of the Rhapta is a little more to the south.’[^[2]]

Amongst my scanty literary belongings on our march to the Tanganyika Lake was a paper (De Azaniâ Africæ littore Orientali, Commentatio Physiologica, Bonviæ, Formis Caroli Gengii, MDCCCLII.) kindly sent to me by the author, Mr George F. de Bunsen. It quoted that same passage which was a frequent solace to me during our 18 months’ wanderings, and I still preserve the pamphlet as a memory.

Nor had I forgotten Camoens:—

‘And there behold the lakes wherein the Nile

is born, a truth the ancients never knew;

see how he bathes, ’gendering the crocodile,

th’ Abassian land, where man to Christ is true.

behold, how lacking ramparts (novel style!)

he fights heroic battle with the foe.

see Meroe, island erst of ancient fame,

Nobá amongst the peoples now its name.’[^[3]]

Lusiad, Canto x. 95.

This is happier and truer to antiquity than the doubts of José Basilio da Gama:—

‘—the sombre range

Virginal, ne’er by foot of man profaned,

Where rise Nile’s fountains, if such fountains be.’

O Uruguay, Canto v.

I consulted my excellent friend the late Dr Barth, of Timbuktu, about following the footsteps of pilot Diogenes the Fortunate. He replied in a kind and encouraging letter, hinting, however, that no prudent man would pledge himself to discover the Nile sources. The Royal Geographical Society benevolently listened once more to my desire of penetrating into the heart of the Dark Continent. An Expeditionary Committee was formed by Sir Roderick I. Murchison, the late Rear-admiral Beechey (then President of the Society), Colonel Sykes, Chairman of the Court of Directors of the Hon. East Indian Company, Mr Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Mr Francis Galton, the South African traveller, and Mr John Arrowsmith. I did not hear, strange to say, till many years had passed, of the active part which Vice-admiral Sir George Back, the veteran explorer of the Arctic regions, had taken in urging the expedition, and in proposing me as its head. Had it been otherwise, this recognition of his kindness would not have come so tardily.

The Committee obtained from Lord Clarendon, then H. M.’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the sum of £1000, and it was understood that the same amount would be advanced by the then ruling Court of Directors. Unfortunately it was found wanting. I received, however, on Sept. 13, 1856, formal permission, ‘in compliance with the request of the Royal Geographical Society, to be absent from duty as a regimental officer under the patronage of H. B. Majesty’s Government, to be despatched into Equatorial Africa, for a period not exceeding two years, calculated from the date of departure from Bombay, upon the pay and allowances of my rank.’ So wrote the Merchant-Sultans.

I was anxious again to take Lieut. John Hanning Speke, because he had suffered with me in purse and person at Berberah, and because he, like the rest of the party, could obtain no redress. Our misfortunes came directly from Aden, indirectly from England. I had proposed to build a fort at Berberah, and to buy all the non-Ottoman ports on the western shores of the Red Sea for the trifle of £10,000. In those days of fierce outcry against ‘territorial aggrandisement’ the Court of Directors looked with horror at such a firebrand proposal, and they were lost in wonder that a subaltern officer should dare to prepare for the Suez Canal, which Lord Palmerston and Mr Robert Stephenson had declared to be impracticable. Therefore the late Dr Buist, editor of the Bombay Times, had his orders to write down the ‘Somali Expedition.’ He was ably assisted by a certain Reverend gentleman, then chaplain at Aden, who had gained for himself the honourable epithet of Shaytan Abyaz, or White Devil, while the apathy of the highest political authority—the Resident at Aden, Brigadier Coghlan—and the active jealousy of his assistant, Captain Playfair, also contributed to thwart all my views, and to bring about, more or less directly, the bloody disaster which befell us at Berberah. For this we had no redress. The Right Honourable the Governor-General of India, the late Lord Dalhousie, of pernicious memory, thought more of using our injuries to cut off the slave-trade than of doing us justice, although justice might easily have been done. After keeping us waiting from April 23, 1855, to June 13, 1857, the spoliator of Oude was pleased to inform us, laconically and disdaining explanation, that he ‘could not accede to the application.’[^[4]]

Nothing could persuade the Court of Directors to dispense with the services of Lieut. Speke, who had, like myself, volunteered for the Crimea, and who, at the end of the War, had resolved to travel for the rest of his leave. I persuaded him to accompany me as far as Bombay, trusting that the just and generous Governor, the late Lord Elphinstone, who had ever warmly supported my projects, and that my lamented friend James Grant Lumsden, then Member of Council, would enable us, despite official opposition at home, to tide over all obstacles.

I have been prolix upon these points, which suggest that the difficulty of reaching the Lunar Mountains, or the ‘Invisos Fontes,’ were in London, not in Africa; that the main obstacles were not savages and malaria, but civilized rivalry and vis inertiæ; and that the requisites for success were time, means, and freedom from official trammels. Hardly had we reached Cairo (Nov. 6, 1856), and had inspected an expedition fitted out by H. H. the late Abbas Pasha, and admirably organized by the late Marie Joseph Henri Leonie de Lauture, Marquis d’Escayrac (generally known as Comte d’Escayar de Lauture), when an order from the Court of Directors summoned me back to give evidence at some wretched Court-martial pending on Colonel A. Shirley. The document being so worded that it could not be obeyed, we—Lieut. Speke and I—held on our way.

And even when outward bound, I again got into trouble, without being able, as was said of Lord Gough, to get out again. A short stay at Suez, and the voyage down the Red Sea, taught me enough of Anglo-Indian mismanagement and of Arab temper, to foresee some terrible disaster. Again that zeal! Instead of reporting all things couleur de rose, I sent under flying seal, through the Royal Geographical Society, with whom I directly corresponded, a long memorandum, showing the true state of affairs, for transmission to the home branch of the Indian Government. This ‘meddling in politics’ was ‘viewed with displeasure by Government,’ and reminded me of the old saying—

‘Wha mells wi’ what anither does,

May e’en gang hame and shoe his goose.’

The result was a ‘wig’ received in the heart of Africa, and—curious coincidence!—accompanying that sheet of foolscap was a newspaper containing news of the Jeddah massacre (June 15, 1858), and of our farcical revenge for the deaths of Messrs Page, Eveillard, and some fourteen souls, nearly the whole Christian colony.[^[5]] It need hardly be mentioned that this catastrophe showed the way to others, especially to the three days ‘Tausheh’ of Damascus in 1860.

Fortune had now worked her little worst. We had a pleasant passage to Bombay (Nov. 23, 1856), where affairs assumed a brighter aspect, as we began preparing for the long exploration. Lord Elphinstone, after an especial requisition, allowed Lieut. Speke to accompany me. He also kindly ordered the Hon. East India Company’s sloop of war Elphinstone, Captain Frushard, I.N., to convoy us, knowing how much importance Orientals attach to appearances—especially to first appearances. My ‘father’ Frushard gained nothing by the voyage but the loss of his pay; therefore is my gratitude to him the greater. Nor must I forget to record the obliging aid of Mr, now Sir Henry L. Anderson, Secretary to the Government of Bombay; he enabled us to borrow from the public stores a chronometer, surveying instruments, and other necessaries.

Judging that a medical officer would be useful, not only to the members of the expedition, but would also prove valuable in lands where the art of healing is not held destructive, and where Medici are not called ‘Caucifici et Sanicidæ,’ Lord Elphinstone also detached the late Dr J. F. Steinhaeuser, then staff-surgeon, to accompany us. Unfortunately the order came too late. No merchantman happened then to be leaving Aden for Zanzibar, and during the south-west monsoon native craft will not attempt the perilous passage. Nothing daunted, my old and tried friend crossed the Straits to Berberah, with the gallant project of marching down country to join us in the south; nor did he desist till it became evident, from his slow rate of progress, that he could not make Zanzibar in time. The journey through the North-eastern horn of Africa would alone have given a title to Fame. Its danger and difficulty were subsequently proved (October 2, 1865) by the wounding of Baron Theodore von Heughlin and by the murder of Baron von der Decken, Dr Link, and others of his party.[^[6]]

The absence of Dr Steinhaeuser lost the East African Expedition more than can be succinctly told. A favourite with ‘natives’ wherever he went, a tried traveller, a man of literary tastes and of extensive reading, and better still, a spirit as staunch and determined as ever attempted desperate enterprise,—he would doubtless have materially furthered our views, and in all human probability Lieut. Speke would have escaped deafness and fever-blight, I paralysis and its consequent invalidism. We afterwards wandered together over the United States, and it is my comfort, now that he also is gone, to think that no unkind thought, much less an unfriendly word, ever broke our fair companionship. His memory is doubly dear to me. He was one of the very few who, through evil as well as through good report, disdained to abate an iota of his friendship, and whose regard was never warmer than when all the little world looked its coldest. After long years of service in pestilential Aden, the ‘Coal-hole of the East,’ he died suddenly of apoplexy at Berne, when crossing Switzerland to revisit his native land. At that time I was wandering about the Brazil, and I well remember dreaming, on what proved to be the date of his death, that a tooth suddenly fell to the ground, followed by a crash of blood. Such a friend, indeed, becomes part of oneself. I still feel a pang as my hand traces these lines.

NOTE.

‘The Bashi Bazuks, commanded by General Beatson, were displaying all the violence and rapacity of their class, little, if at all, restrained by the presence of their English officers.’ Thus writes Mr John William Kaye in ‘Our Indian Heroes’ (Good Words, June, 1851), for the greater glorification of a certain General Neill, whose principal act of heroism was to arrest a ‘Jack-in-Office Station Master.’ Mr Kaye is essentially an official writer, but even official inspiration should not be allowed directly to misstate fact.

CHAPTER II.
ARRIVAL AT ZANZIBAR ISLAND.

‘There is probably no part of the world where the English Government has so long had a Resident, where there are always some half-a-dozen merchants and planters, of which we know so little as of the capital and part of the kingdom of one of the most faithful of our allies, with whom we have for half a century (since 1804) been on terms of intimacy.’—Transactions Bombay Geog. Soc., 1856.

On December 2, 1856—fourteen long years ago!—we bade adieu to the foul harbour of Bombay the Beautiful, with but a single sigh. The warm-hearted Mr Lumsden saw us on board, wrung our hands with friendly vigour, and bade us go in and win—deserve success if we could not command it. No phantom of the future cast a shadow upon our sunny path as we set out, determined either to do or die. I find my journal brimful of enthusiasm. ‘Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood. Excitement lends unwonted vigour to the muscles, and the sudden sense of freedom adds a cubit to the mental stature. Afresh dawns the morn of life; again the bright world is beautiful to the eye, and the glorious face of nature gladdens the soul. A journey, in fact, appeals to Imagination, to Memory, to Hope,—the three sister Graces of our moral being.’[^[7]]

The 18½ days spent in sailing 2400 direct miles ‘far o’er the red equator’ were short for our occupations. I read all that had been written upon the subject of Zanzibar, from Messer Marco Miglione to the learned Vincent, who always suspected either the existence or the place of the absurd ‘Maravi Lake.’ We rubbed up our acquaintance with the sextant and the altitude and azimuth; and we registered barometer and thermometer, so as to have a base for observations ashore. The nearest reference point of known pressure to Zanzibar was then Aden, distant above 1000 miles. Under all circumstances the distance was undesirable; moreover, violent squalls between the Persian Gulf and Cape Guardafui sometimes depress the mercury half an inch. I shall again refer to this point in Chapter V.

‘Father Frushard’ was genial, as usual, and under his command every soul was happy. We greatly enjoyed the order, coolness, and cleanliness of a ship of war, after the confusion, the caloric, and the manifold impurities of a Red Sea passenger-packet. Here were no rattling, heaving throbs, making you tremulous as a jelly in the Caniculi; no coal-smoke, intrusive as on a German Eisen-bahn; no thirst-maddened (cock-) ‘roaches’ exploring the entrance to man’s stomach; no cabins rank with sulphuretted hydrogen; no decks whereon pallid and jaundiced passengers shake convulsed shoulders as they rush to and from the bulwarks and the taffrail. Also no ‘starboard and larboard exclusiveness’; of flirting abigails tending portly and majestic dames, who look crooked beyond the salvation-pale of their own very small ‘set’; no peppery civilians rubbing skirts against heedless ‘griffins’; nor fair lips maltreating the ‘hapless letter H’; nor officers singing lullabies to their etiolated enfants terribles, and lacking but one little dispensation of nature—concerning which Humboldt treats—to become the best of wet-nurses. The ‘Elphinstone’ belonged not to the category ‘Shippe of Helle,’ one of whose squadron I have described in an old voyage to a certain ‘Unhappy Valley.’ We would willingly have prolonged our cruise with the jovial captain, and with the good fellows and gallant gentlemen in the gun-room, over many and many a league of waves.

Of course we had no adventures. We saw neither pirate nor slaver. The tract seemed desert of human life; in fact, nothing met our eyes but flying-fish at sea, gulls and gannets near shore. The stiff N. East trade never quite failed us, even when crossing the Line, and the Doldrums hardly visited us with a tornado or two—mere off-shore squalls. The good old heart of teak, then aged 33 years, made an average of 150, and an exceptional run of 200 knots, in 24 hours. This was indeed ‘gay sailing on the bosom of the Indian Sea.’ After 16 days (Dec. 18), before the solar lamp had been removed, our landfall, a long, low strip at first sky-blue and distance-blurred, had turned purple, and had robed itself in green and gold, with a pomp and a glory of vegetation then new to us. This was Pemba, one of the three continental islands composing the Zanzibarian archipelago: the Arabs call it Jazirat el Khazrá (Green Island), and no wonder! Verdant and fresh enough must this huge conservatory, this little and even richer Zanzibar, appear to their half-closed ‘peepers,’ dazed and seared by the steely skies and brazen grounds of Mángá[^[8]] (Arabia generally) and Maskat (Muscat), and by the dreadful glare and ‘damnable blue’ of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. We are soon to visit this emerald isle, therefore no more of it at present.

All had hoped to run in that night, but Fate or our evil deeds in the last life otherwise determined. The wind fell with the sun, and during the five minutes of crepuscule we anchored in the sandy bay-strand under Tumbatu Island, S.W. of Point Nunguwi (Owen’s Nangowy), the north cape of its big insular brother, Zanzibar. Like the items of this archipelago generally, it is a long cairn-shaped reef of coralline, with its greater length disposed N.S. This well-known norm of great peninsulas has been explained by a sudden change in the earth’s centre of gravity, which caused the waters to rush furiously from the northern hemisphere towards the south pole. As usual, the burning suns, the tepid winds, the sopping dews, and the copious rains clothe the thin soil with an impervious coat of verdure, overhanging the salt-waters, and boasting a cultivation that would make spring in green Erin look by its side autumn—rusty and yellow-brown.

We landed, and curiously inspected the people of Tumbatu, for we were now beyond Semitico-Abyssinian centres, and we stood in the presence of another and a new race. They are called by the Omani Arabs Makhádim—helots or serviles—and there is nothing free about them save their morals. Suspicious and fearful, numerous and prolific, poor and ill-favoured, they show all the advantages and the disadvantages of an almost exclusive ichthyophagism. Skilful in divination, especially by Báo or geomancy, they have retained, despite El Islam, curious practices palpably derived from their wild ancestry of the Blackmoor shore. They repair, for the purpose of ‘clear-seeing,’ to a kind of Trophonius cave, spend the night in attack of inspiration, and come forth in the morning ‘Agelasti, mæsti, cogitabundi.’ Similarly the Nas-Amun (Nasamone) slept, for insight into futurity, upon their ancestral graves. The wild highlanders of the East African ghauts have an equally useful den in their grim mountains; and on the West African coast the Krumen consult the ‘Great Debbil,’ who lives in a hole amongst the rocks of Grand Cavalla. The traveller who, pace my friends of the Anthropological Society, postulates spiritualism or spiritism (as M. Allan Kardec has it), will save himself much mystification, and he will soon find that every race has had, and still has, its own Swedenborg.

The men of Tumbatu at their half-heathen wakes, lay out the corpse, masculine or feminine, and treat it in a way which reminds us of Hamlet’s (Act v. 1) ‘Where be your gibes now? your gambols, your songs?’ A male friend will say to his departed chum—

‘O certain person! but a few days ago I asked thee for cocoa-nut-water and tobacco, which thou deniedest to me—enh? Where is now the use of them?’

‘Fellow!’ a woman will address the dead, ‘dost thou remember making fierce love to me at such and such a time? Much good will thy love do me now that thou art the meat of ugly worms!’

Their abuse is never worse than when lavished by a creditor upon a defunct debtor.

The idea underlying this custom is probably that which suggested the Irish wake—a test if the clay be really inanimate. Nor would I despise, especially during prevalence of plague or yellow fever, in lands where you are interred off-hand, any precaution, however barbarous, against the horrors and the shudders of burying alive. Certain Madras Hindoos, after filling its mouth with milk and rapping its face with a shankh or conch-shell, grossly insult, as only the ‘mild Hindu’ of Bishop Heber can, all its feminine relatives. The practice is also found in the New World. The Aruacas (Arrawaks) of Guiana opened the eyes of the corpse, and switched them with thorns; smeared the cheeks and lips with lard, and applied alternately sweet and bitter words. This was a curious contrast to the customs of the Brazilian Tupys and the Bolivian Moxos, who, according to Yves d’Evreux and Alcide d’Orbigny, met every morning to bewail their losses, even of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers!

As darkness came on we saw the sands sparkling with lights, here stationary like glow-worms or the corpusant; there flitting about like ignes fatui or fire-flies. Such was the spectacle seen by Columbus and Pedro Gutierrez (‘gentleman of the king’s bedchamber’) on the memorable night when Bahaman Guanaháni was discovered. The fishermen burn dry grass and leaves, and the blaze, like the Arabs’ ‘fire of hunting,’ which dazzles the eye of the gazelle, attracts shoals that are easily speared. Some carried torches in canoes: now the flame floated in crimpled water, which broke up its reflection into a scatter of brilliants; then it reposed upon mirror-like smooths, the brand forming the apex of a red pyramid which seemed to tremble with life, whilst the boat was buried in the darkness of death. And so ‘fishy’ are these equinoctial seas, that gangs of old women and children may be seen at Pemba, and on the coast, converting their body-clothes into nets, and filling pots, hand over hand, with small fry. I have seen them myself, although a certain critic says, ‘No.’

The people of Tumbatu, like the Greeks, have their good points. They are skilful pilots and stout seamen, diligent in gathering their bread from the waters, and comparatively industrious, considering their enervating, prostrating climate. Their low, jungly ledge wants the sweet element, compelling them to fetch it from Zanzibar—their mainland; hence travellers have described the islet as uninhabited. The people are mentioned as Moslems by Yakut (early 13th century), and this island of ‘Tambat’ was made a refuge for the inhabitants of Languja or Zanzibar. We inquired in vain about the fort which the Arabs are said to have built there. The skins of Tumbatu are sooty, the effect, according to some, according to others the concomitant, of humid heat. The reader must not charge me with ‘trimming’ between the rival schools of ‘race versus climate, the cause of complexion.’ Many peoples betray but a modicum of chromatic and typical change. On the other hand, I have found an approximation of colour as well as of form between the Anglo-American and the Luso-Brazilian; and I have enlarged upon this chromatic heresy, if heresy it be, in the Highlands of the Brazil (Vol. i. chap. xxxviii.). Finally, when speaking of the permanence of type, it is well to bear in mind that our poor observations hardly extend over 2500 years.

The next morning placed us at the base of our operations, and we were on deck with Aurora. The stout ship ‘Elphinstone,’ urged by the cool land breeze, slid down the channel, the sea-river that separates the low-lying and evergreen Zanzibar Island from its reflection, the Mpoa-ni.[^[9]] We were sensibly affected by the difference between the Sawáhil, this part of the East African sea-board which begins at the Juba River, and the grim physiognomy of Somaliland, Region of Fragrant Gums, with its sandy horrors of Berberah, and its granitic grandeurs of Guardafui, which popular apprehension refers to Garde à vous, and which Abyssinian Bruce, according to Ritter (Erdkunde, 2nd Division, § 8), altered, to Gardefan, the Straits of Burial.[^[10]] We were in the depths of the ‘dries,’ as they are called in West Africa, in the local midwinter, yet this land was gorgeous in its vestment when others would be hybernating in more than semi-nudity.

Truly prepossessing was our first view of the then mysterious island of Zanzibar, set off by the dome of distant hills, like solidified air, that form the swelling line of the Zanzibar coast. Earth, sea, and sky, all seemed wrapped in a soft and sensuous repose, in the tranquil life of the Lotus Eaters, in the swoon-like slumbers of the Seven Sleepers, in the dreams of the Castle of Indolence. The sea of purest sapphire, which had not parted with its blue rays to the atmosphere—a frequent appearance near the equator—lay basking, lazy as the tropical man, under a blaze of sunshine which touched every object with a dull burnish of gold. The wave had hardly energy enough to dandle us, or to cream with snowy foam the yellow sandstrip which separated it from the flower-spangled grass, and from the underwood of dark metallic green. The breath of the ocean would hardly take the trouble to ruffle the fronds of the palm which sprang, like a living column, graceful and luxuriant, high above its subject growths. The bell-shaped convolvulus (Ipomæa Maritima), supported by its juicy bed of greenery, had opened its pink eyes to the light of day, but was languidly closing them, as though gazing upon the face of heaven were too much of exertion. The island itself seemed over-indolent, and unwilling to rise; it showed no trace of mountain or crag, but all was voluptuous with gentle swellings, with the rounded contours of the girl-negress, and the brown-red tintage of its warm skin showed through its gauzy attire of green. And over all bent lovingly a dome of glowing azure, reflecting its splendours upon the nether world, whilst every feature was hazy and mellow, as if viewed through ‘woven air,’ and not through vulgar atmosphere. Most of my countrymen find monotony in these Claude-Lorraine skies, with the pigment and glazing on. I remember how in Sind they used to bless the storm-cloud, and stand joyously to be drenched in the rain which rarely falls in that leather-coloured land. Zanzibar, however, must be seen on one of her own fine days: like Fernando Po and Rio de Janeiro, the beauty can look ‘ugly’ enough when she pleases.

As we drew nearer and vision became more distinct, we found as many questions for the pilot as did Vasco da Gama of old. Those prim plantations which, from the offing, resembled Italian avenues of oranges, the tea-gardens of China, the vines of romantic Provence, the coffee plantations of the Brazil, or the orange-yards of Paraguay, were the celebrated clove-grounds, and the largest, streaking the central uplands, were crown property. We distinctly felt a heavy spicy perfume, as if passing before the shop of an Egyptian ‘attar,’ and the sensorium was not the less pleasantly affected, after a hard diet of briny N.E. Trade. Various legends of hair-oil rubbed upon the bulwarks have made many a tricked traveller a shallow infidel in the matter of smelling the land. But we soon learned that off Zanzibar, as off ‘Mozámbic,’ the fragrant vegetation makes old Ocean smile, pleased with the grateful smell, as of yore. The night breeze from the island is cool and heavy with clove perfume, and European residents carefully exclude the land-wind from their sleeping-rooms.

For a little while we glided S. by E. along the shore, where the usual outlines of a city took from it the reproach of being a luxuriant wilderness. The first was ‘Bayt el Ra’as, a large pile, capped with a dingy pent-house of cajan (cocoa leaves), and backed by swelling ground—here bared for cultivation, there sprinkled with dense dark trees, masses of verdure sheltering hut and homestead. Followed at the distance of a mile, the Royal Cascine and Harem of Mto-ni, the Rivulet.[^[11]] Our ancient ally ‘Sayyid Said, Imam of Maskat and Sultan of Zanzibar and the Sawahil,’ had manifestly not attempted African copies of his palaces in Arabian Shináz and Bat’hah, pavilions with side-wings and flanking towers, the buildings half castle half château, so much affected by the feudal lords of Oman. He preferred an Arabo-African modification, here valuable for ‘sommer-frisch.’

The demesne of Mto-ni has a quaint manner of Gothic look, pauperish and mouldy, like the schloss of some duodecimo Teutonic Prince, or long-titled, short-pursed, placeless, and pensionless German Serenity in the days now happily gone by, when the long drear night of German do-nothingness has fled before the glorious daybreak of 1866-1870. We can distinguish upon its long rusty front a projecting balcony of dingy planking, with an extinguisher-shaped roof, dwarfed by the luxuriant trees arear, and by the magnificent vegetation which rolls up to its very walls. Mto-ni takes its name from a runnel which, draining the uplands, supplies the ‘Palace,’ and trickles through a conduit into the sea. We shall presently visit it.

Entering the coral reef which defends this great store-house of Eastern Intertropical Africa, I remarked that the lucent amethyst of the waters was streaked and patched with verdigris green; the ‘light of the waves’ being caused by shoals, whose golden sands blended with the blue of heaven. The ‘Passes of Zanzibar’ reminded me in colouration of the ‘Gateways of Jeddah,’ and as the coral reefs cut like razors, they must be threaded with equal care. So smooth was the surface within the walls, that each ship, based upon a thread of light, seemed to hover over its own reflected image.

And now we could distinguish the normal straight line of Arab town, extending about a mile and a half in length, facing north, and standing out in bold relief, from the varied tints and the grandeur of forest that lay behind. A Puritanical plainness characterized the scene—cathedrals without the graceful minarets of Jeddah, mosques without the cloisters of Cairo, turrets without the domes and monuments of Syria; and the straight stiff sky-line was unrelieved except by a few straggling palms. In the centre, and commanding the anchorage, was a square-curtained artless fort, conspicuous withal, and fronted by a still more contemptible battery. To its right and left the Imam’s palace, the various Consulates, and the large parallelogrammic buildings of the great, a tabular line of flat roofs, glaring and dazzling like freshly white-washed sepulchres, detached themselves from the mass, and did their best to conceal the dingy matted hovels of the inner town. Zanzibar city, to become either picturesque or pleasing, must be viewed, like Stambul, from afar.

We floated past the guard-ship, an old 50-gun frigate of Dutch form and Bombay build, belonging to ‘His Highness the Sayyid;’ it was modestly named Shah Allum (Alam), or ‘King of the World.’ The few dark faces on board bawled out information unintelligible to our pilot, and showed no colours, as is customary when a foreign cruizer enters the port. We set this down to the fact of their being blacks—‘careless Ethiopians.’ But flags being absent from all the masts, and here, as in West Africa and in the Brazil, every ‘house’ flies its own bunting, we decided that there must be some cause for the omission, and we became anxious accordingly.

But not for such small matter would the H. E. I. C.’s ship-of-war ‘Elphinstone’ have the trouble of casting loose and of loading her guns gratis. With the Sayyid’s plain blood-red ensign at the main, and with union-jack at the fore, she cast anchor in Front Bay, and gallantly delivered her fire of 21. Thereupon a gay bunting flew up to every truck ashore and afloat, whilst the brass carronades of the ‘Victoria,’ another item of the Maskat navy, roared a response of 22, and, curious to say, did not blow off a single gunner’s arms. We had arrived on the fortieth or last day of Moslem mourning; and the mourning was for Sayyid Said, our native friend and ally, who had for so many years been calling for volunteers and explorers, and from whom the East African expedition had been taught to expect every manner of aid except the pecuniary.

We lost no time in tumbling into a gig and in visiting the British Consulate, a large solid pile, coloured like a twelfth-cake, and shaped like a claret-chest, which lay on its side, comfortably splashed by the sea. Lieut.-Colonel Atkins Hamerton, of the Indian Army, H.B.M.’s Consul and H. E. I. C.’s agent, to whom I was directed to report arrival, was now our mainstay, but we found him in the poorest state of health. He was aroused from lethargy by the presence of strangers, and after the usual hospitable orders my letters were produced and read. Those entrusted to me by Lord Elphinstone, and by his Eminence the learned and benevolent Cardinal Wiseman, for whom he had the profoundest respect, pleased him greatly; but he put aside the missive of the Royal Geographical Society, declaring that he had been terribly worried for ‘copy’ by sundry writing and talking members of that distinguished body.

I can even now distinctly see my poor friend sitting before me, a tall, broad-shouldered, and powerful figure, with square features, dark, fixed eyes, hair and beard prematurely snow-white, and a complexion once fair and ruddy, but long ago bleached ghastly pale by ennui and sickness. Such had been the effect of the burning heats of Maskat and ‘the Gulf,’ and the deadly damp of Zanzibar, Island and Coast. The worst symptom in his case—one which I have rarely found other than fatal—was his unwillingness to quit the place which was slowly killing him. At night he would chat merrily about a remove, about a return to Ireland; he loathed the subject in the morning. To escape seemed a physical impossibility, when he had only to order a few boxes to be packed, and to board the first home-returning ship. In this state the invalid requires the assistance of a friend, of a man who will order him away, and who will, if he refuses, carry him off by main force.

Our small mountain of luggage was soon housed, and we addressed ourselves seriously to the difficulties of our position. That night’s rest was not sweet to us. I became as the man of whom it was written—

‘So coy a dame is Sleep to him,

That all the weary courtship of his thoughts

Can’t win her to his bed.’

After the disaster in Somali-land, I was pledged, at all risks and under all circumstances, to succeed; and now St Julian, host and patron of travellers, had begun to show me the rough side of his temper. The Consul was evidently unfit for the least exertion. He had in his ‘godowns’ dozens of chests and cases which he had not the energy to open. H. H. Sayyid Said had left affairs in a most unsatisfactory state. His eldest son, the now murdered Sayyid Suwayni, heir to Maskat, and famous as an anglophobe, had threatened to attack Zanzibar; a menace which, as will afterwards appear, he attempted to carry out. The cadet Sayyid Majid, installed by his father chief of the African possessions, was engrossed in preparations for defence. Moreover, this amiable young prince having lately recovered from confluent small-pox, an African endemic which had during the last few years decimated the islanders, was ashamed to display a pock-marked face to the ‘public,’ ourselves included. The mainland of Northern Zanzibar about Lamu was, as usual on such occasions, in a state of anarchy. Every man seized the opportunity of slaying his enemy, or of refusing to pay his taxes. An exceptionally severe drought had reduced the southern coast of Zanzibar to a state of famine.

Briefly, the gist of the whole was that I had better return to Bombay. But rather than return to Bombay, I would have gone to Hades on that 20th of December, 1856.

NOTE.

Since these pages were penned the Bombay Gazette of November 11, 1870, announced the death of H. H. Sayyid Majid, Sultan of Zanzibar, and the succession of his brother—Sayyid Burghush.

CHAPTER III.
HOW THE NILE QUESTION STOOD IN THE YEAR
OF GRACE 1856.

Αὐτὴ μεν ἤδε τῆς περιῤῥύτου χθονος.

This is the finial of th’ encircling earth.

Soph. Phil.

In this chapter I propose briefly to place before the reader the various shiftings of opinion touching the Nile Sources, and especially to show what had been done for Zanzibar and her coast by the theoretical and practical men of Europe between A.D. 1825 and the time of our landing on the Sawáhil, or East African shores.

The details given to Marinus of Tyre by the Arabian merchants, and their verification by the obscure Diogenes, together with the notices of the African lakes on the lower part of the Upper Nile, brought home about A.D. 60 by Nero’s exploring Centurions, were never wholly forgotten by Europe, which thus unlearned to derive with Herodotus the Nile from Western Africa.[^[12]] As the pages of Marco Polo show, not to quote the voyage of ‘Sinbad the Sailor,’ Arabs and Persians still frequented these shores; and the Hindu Banyans, established from time immemorial upon the Zanzibar coast, had diffused throughout India some information touching the wealthy land. The veteran geographer of Africa, Mr James Macqueen, has commented upon the curious fact that the Padmavan of Lieut. Francis Wilford (vol. iii. of the old Asiatic Researches, ‘Course of the River Cali,’ as supposed to be derived from the Puranas) is represented by the beds of floating water-lilies crossed by Captains Speke and Grant, and upon the resemblance between the Amara, or Lake of the Gods, with the Amara people on the N. E. of the so-called Nyanza Lake. These, however, appear to be mere coincidences, or at best the results of tales learned upon the coast by the Hindu trader. Before leaving Bombay I applied to that eminent Sanskritist the Rev. J. Wilson, D.D., for any notices of East Africa which might occur in the sacred writings of the Hindus. He replied that there were none; and I had long before learned that Col. Wilford himself had acknowledged his pandit to have been an impudent impostor.

At the end of the 15th century came the Portuguese explorers, with Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy, in their hands, and followed by a multitude of soldiers, merchants, and missionaries, who invested the intertropical maritime regions of Africa, east and west. The first enthusiasm, however, soon passed away. The Portuguese were supplanted by the Dutch, by the English, and by the French; whilst Ptolemy and the Periplus were ousted by Pigafetta, Dapper, and other false improvers of their doctrines. The Ptolemeian Lakes were marched about and counter-marched in every possible way. The ‘Mountain of the Moon,’ prolonged across Africa under the name Jebel Kumri, really became ‘Lunatic Mountains.’ The change from good to bad geography is well illustrated by two charts published in 1860, by H. E. the Conde de Lavradio. The first is the fac-simile of a map in the British Museum, by Diogo Homem, in 1558. It makes the Nile spring from two great reservoirs. But the second, bearing the name of Antonio Sances (1623), already reduces these lakes to one central Caspian, which sends forth the Nile, the Congo, and the Zambeze, and which, greatly shrunken, still deforms our maps under the name of Marave. Similarly, the ‘Complete System of Geography,’ by Emanuel Bowen (1747), places the Zambre Lake in S. lat. 4°-11°, the ‘centre from which proceed all the rivers in this part of Africa,’ including the Nile.

How popular the subject continued to be may be guessed from the fact that Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), cast his African reading into a favourite form with him, the ‘Adventures of Captain Singleton.’ He lands his hero about March, 1701, a little south of Cape Delgado, causes him to cross several seas and rivers, the latter often flowing northwards, and after a year’s wandering, brings him out at the Dutch settlements on the Gold Coast.

Upon the general question of modern Nile literature the curious reader will consult the well-studied writings of M. Vivien de Saint-Martin. The valuable paper ‘On the Knowledge the Ancients possessed of the Sources of the Nile,’ by my friend W. S. W. Vaux (Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. viii., New Series), treats of exploration up the river, beginning from the Ionian colony, established in the upper river by Psammetichus (circa A.C. 600), and extending to the present day. The learned article by Mr John Hogg, ‘On some old Maps of Africa, in which certain of the Central and Equatorial Lakes are laid down in nearly their true positions,’[^[13]] (Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. viii.), supplies a compendium of old cartography.

I proceed now to the practical part of this chapter, namely, the actual visits of inspection to Zanzibar, and their results. Until the end of the last century, our knowledge was derived almost entirely from those ‘domini Orientalis Africæ,’ the Portuguese. The few exceptions were Sir James Lancaster, who opened to the English the Orient seas. He wintered at the island in 1591; Captain Alexander Hamilton (new account of the East Indies, 1688-1723, Hakluyt’s Collection, viii. 258); and M. Saulnier de Mondevit, commanding the king’s Corvette, La Prévoyance. The latter, who, in 1786, visited the principal points of Zanzibar, published a chart with ‘Observations sur la côte du Zangueibar’ (Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, vol. vi.), and recommended a French establishment at ‘Mongalo.’

In February, 1799, Captain Bissel, R.N., commanding H. M.’s ship Orestes, with the Leopard carrying Admiral Blankett’s flag, touched at the island for refreshments when beating up against the N. E. monsoon towards the Red Sea. He briefly but faithfully described its geography, and he laid down sailing directions which to this day are retained in Horsburgh. Since then many coasting voyages have been made by naval officers and others, who collected from natives, with more or less fidelity, details concerning the inner country. As early as 1811, Captain Smee and Lieutenant Hardy were sent by the Bombay government to gather information on the eastern seaboard of Africa, and they brought back sundry novel details (Transactions Bombay Geographical Society, 1844, p. 23, &c.). Between the years 1822-1826 the whole coast line was surveyed by Captain (afterwards Admiral) W. F. Owen, and by his officers, Captains Vidal, Boteler, and others. Their charts and plans of the littoral, despite sundry inaccuracies, such as placing Zanzibar Island five miles west of its proper position, excited general attention, and were justly termed by a modern author miranda tabularum series. During this Herculean labour, which occupied three years, some 300 of the officers and crew fell victims to the climate of the Coast, to the hardships of boat-work, and to the ferocity of the natives. In 1822 Sir Robert Townsend Fairfax, Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Mauritius, after a crusade against the slave-trade in the dominions of Radáma, King of the Hovas, commissioned Captain (afterwards Admiral) Fairfax Moresby, of H. M.’s ship Menai, to draft a treaty between England and Maskat for limiting the traffic. The mission was successful. The sale of Somalis, a free people, was made piracy; and the Sayyid’s vessels were subject to seizure by the Royal, including the Company’s, cruizers, if detected carrying negroes ‘to the east of a line drawn from Cape Delgado, passing south of Socotra and on to Diu, the west point of the Gulf of Cambay.’[Cambay.’][^[14]] In 1822, the Sayyid’s assent having been formally accorded, Captain Moresby left the coast.

In January, 1834, Captain Hart, of H. M.’s ship Imogene, visited Zanzibar, and submitted to the Imperial government brief notes, appending a list of the Sayyid’s squadron then in the harbour, with their age, tonnage, armature, and other particulars. Still geographers declared that Zanzibar was a more mysterious spot to England and India than parts of Central Africa and the shores of the Icy Sea.[^[15]] During the same year the energetic Mr W. Bollaert matured the plan of an expedition, to be conducted by himself, from Zanzibar across the continent. It was laid before the Geographical Society in 1837, but it was not carried out, funds being deficient. In 1835 the U. S. frigate Peacock visited the island during a treaty-making tour, and was supplied with all her wants gratis, the port officials declaring that ‘H. H. the Sultan of Muscat had forbidden them to take any remuneration.’ The surgeon, Dr Ruschenherger (Narrative of a Voyage round the World in 1835-1837), left a realistic description of the city in those its best days. He acknowledges the hospitalities of ‘Captain Hasan bin Ibrahim, of the Arab Navy,’ superintendent of the ‘Prince Said Carlid.’ The latter was the late Sayyid Khalid, then 16 years old. The book, being written by a ‘Dutch-American’ in 1835, is of course bitterly hostile to England. We are told that the keel of the Peacock, passing between Tumbatu Island and Zanzibar, scraped over coral reefs not in Owen’s charts—which may be true. Followed the American Captains Fisher, Drinker, Abbott, and Osgood, and Mr Ross Brown, then a young traveller in a trading-vessel. He also published a readable account of the rising settlement.

When Admiral Sir Charles Malcolm, a name endeared to eastern geographers, was giving energy and impulse to exploration in Western Asia, the late Lieut. W. Christopher, I. N., commanding the H. E. I. C.’s brig-of-war Tigris, was sent to Zanzibar; he made a practical survey of the coast, and he touched at many places now famous—Kilwa (Quiloa), Mombasah, Brava, Marka, Gob-wen (or the Jub River), and Makdishu, or Hanir, by the Portuguese called Magadoxo. He explored the lower waters of a large stream, the Webbe (River) Ganana, or Shebayli (Leopard), which he injudiciously named the Haines River; and he visited Giredi and other settlements till then unknown. He wrote (May 8, 1843) a highly interesting and comprehensive account of the seaboard, which was published in the Journal of the Geographical Society (vol. xiv. of 1844). His plans, charts, and other valuable memoranda were forwarded to the Bombay Government, and the enterprising traveller died in July, 1848, at the early age of 36, from the effects of a wound received before Multan.

The honour of having made the first systematic attempt to explore and to open up the Zanzibar interior, is due to the establishment popularly known as the ‘Mombas Mission;’ its energetic members proved that it was possible to penetrate beyond the coast, and their discoveries excited a spirit of inquiry which led to the exploration of the Lake Regions. In 1842 the Rev. Dr J. Lewis Krapf, being refused readmittance to Shoa, received a ‘Macedonian call’ to East Africa; in other words, he undertook in 1842, with the approbation of the Church Missionary Society, a coasting voyage to East Africa south of the line. Having visited Zanzibar Island he journeyed northwards (March 1844), and met with a kind reception at Mombasah where he accidentally landed; finally he established his head-quarters amongst the Wanyika tribe at Rabai Mpia near Mombasah, which then became the base of his operations. He was joined (June 1846) by the Rev. J. Rebmann of Gerlingen in Würtemberg, and by Messrs Erhardt and Wagner—the latter a young German mechanic, who died shortly after arrival. In June 2, 1851, came Messrs Conrad Diehlmann and Christian Pfefferle, who soon died. They were followed by three mechanics, Hagemann, Kaiser, and Metzler, who returned home, and by M. Deimler who retired to Bombay. M. Rebmann after visiting Kadiaro (Oct. 14, 1847) made in May 11, 1843 the first of three important journeys into the ‘Jagga’ highlands, and discovered, or rather rediscovered, the much vexed Kilima-njaro. The existence of this mountain bearing eternal snows in eastern intertropical Africa is thus alluded to in the Suma de Geographia of Fernandez de Enciso (1530): ‘West of this port (Mombasah) stands the Mount Olympus of Ethiopia, which is exceedingly high, and beyond it are the “Mountains of the Moon,” in which are the sources of the Nile.’ The discovery was confirmed by Dr Krapf, who after visiting (also in 1848) Fuga, the capital of Usumbara, made two journeys (in 1849 and 1851) into Ukambani. During the first he confirmed the position of Kilima-njaro, and he sighted another snowy peak, Kenia, Kegnia, or Kirenia.

The assertions of the missionaries were variously received. M. Vaux was thereby enabled to explain a statement in the Metereologica of Aristotle, where the first or main stream of the Nile is supposed to flow out of the mountain called Silver. Dr Beke accepted the meridional snowy range, and here placed his Mountains of the Moon, a hypothesis first advanced in 1846. The sceptics were headed by Mr W. D. Cooley, who in 1854 had published his ‘Claudius Ptolemy and the Nile.’ He had identified the mountain of Selene (σελήνη) with the snowy highland of ‘Semenai’ or ‘Samien’ in northern Abyssinia, and thus by adopting a mere verbal resemblance he had obtained a system of truly ‘lunatic mountains.’ Some years before (Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xv. 1845) appeared his paper entitled, ‘The Geography of N’yassi, or the great lake of Southern Africa investigated,’ a complicated misnomer. The article was written in a clear style and a critical tone, showing ample reading but lacking a solid foundation of fact. It began as usual with Pigafetta and de Barros, and it ended with Gamitto and Monteiro; the peroration, headed ‘Harmony of Authorities,’ was a self-gratulation, a song of triumph concerning the greatness of hypothetical discoveries, which were soon proved to be purely fanciful. Not one man in a million has the instincts of a good comparative geographer, and the author was assuredly not that exceptional man. His monograph did good by awaking the scientific mind, but it greatly injured popular geography. It unhappily asserted (p. 15) that ‘in every part of eastern Africa to which our inquiries have extended, snow is quite unknown.’ And the author having laid down his law bowed before it, and expected Fact as well as the Public to do the same; he even attacked the text of Ptolemy, asserting that the passages treating of the Nile sources and the Lunar Mountains were an interpolation of a comparatively recent date. In June and November 1863 the late Baron von der Decken, accompanied by Dr Kersten, an accomplished astronomical observer, ascended some 1300 feet, saw a clearly defined limit of perpetual snow at about 17,000 feet, and by a rough triangulation gave the main peak of Kilima-njaro an elevation of 20,065 feet. Still Mr Cooley, with singular want of candour, denied existence to the snow. It was the same with his ‘Single Sea,’ which under the meaningless and erroneous name ‘N’yassi’ again supplanted Ptolemy’s Lakes, and this want of acumen offered the last insult to African geography. Thus was revived the day when the Arab and Portuguese geographers made the three Niles (of Egypt, Magadoxo, and Nigritia) issue from one vast reservoir, and thus were the school maps of the world disfigured during half a generation. The lake also was painfully distorted, simply that it might ‘run parallel to the line of volcanic action drawn through the Isle de Bourbon, the north of Madagascar, and the Comoro Islands, and to one of the two lines predominating on the coasts of southern Africa wherever there are no alluvial flats.’ It abounded, moreover, in minor but significant errors, such as confounding ‘Zanganyika,’ a town or tribe, with Tanganyika, the name of the Lake. Of late years Mr Cooley has once more shifted his position, and has declared that he did not intend to provide central intertropical Africa between ‘Monomotapa’ and Angola with a single lake. The whole of his paper on the ‘Geography of N’yassi’ means that if it mean anything. He is not, however, the only Proteus—hard to find and harder to bind—amongst African geographers.

To conclude this notice of the ‘Mombas Mission,’ Dr Krapf again visited Fuga, where he was followed by Mr Erhardt, and finally the two missionaries ran down the coast, touched at Kilwa, and extended their course to Cape Delgado. In August 1855 Dr Krapf, after 18 years’ residence in Africa, bade it farewell; he did not revisit it except for a few months in 1867, when he acted dragoman to the Abyssinian Expedition. In January 1856 appeared what has been called the ‘Mombas Mission Map’ (Skizze nach J. Erhardt’s Original), the result of exploration and of notices collected from the natives. It was accompanied by a ‘Memoir of the Chart of East and Central Africa, compiled by J. Erhardt and J. Rebmann.’ This production was ‘remarked upon’ by Mr Cooley (Jan. 8, 1856), and in turn his remarks were remarked upon by Herr Petermann. The peculiar feature of the chart was a ‘monster slug’-like inland Sea extending from the line to S. Lat. 14°,—an impossible Caspian some 840 miles long × 200 to 300 in breadth. I have already explained that this error arose by the fact that the three chief caravan routes from the Zanzibar coast abut upon three several lakes which, in the confusion of African vocabulary—Nyassa being corrupted to N’yassi, and Nyanza also signifying water—were naturally thrown into one. It was, however, to ascertain the existence of this slug-shaped article that the East African Expedition of 1856-59 was sent out.

The most valuable results of Dr Krapf’s labours are his works on the Zanzibarian languages, and these deserve the gratitude of every traveller and student of African philology. The principal are,

Messrs Krapf’s and Isenberg’s imperfect outline of the Galla language (London, 1840).

Messrs Krapf and Isenberg, ‘Vocabulary of the Galla Language,’ London, 1840.

Tentamen imbecillum Translationis Evangelii Joannis in linguam Gallorum, London, 1841.

Messrs Krapf’s, Isenberg’s, and Mühleisen-Arnold’s Vocabulary of the Somali tongue (1843).

(Three chapters of Genesis translated into the ‘Soahilee’ language, with an introduction by W. W. Greenhough: printed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1847, had appeared in the mean time.)

Gospel according to St Luke translated into Kinika, 12mo, Bombay, 1848.

Gospel according to St Mark translated into Kikamba, 8vo, Tübingen, 1850.

Outline of the elements of the Ki-suaheli language, 8vo, Tübingen, 1850.

Vocabulary of 6 East-African languages, small folio, Tübingen, 1850.

Mr Erhardt’s vocabulary of the Enguduk Iloigob or Masai tongue, 8vo, Ludwigburg, 1857.

Besides these there are (1860) in MSS., 1. the entire New Testament (Kisawahili). 2. A complete Dictionary of Ki-suahili. 3. The Gospel according to St Matthew (Kikamba). 4. Matthew and Genesis in Galla, &c., &c., &c.

Dr Krapf’s last work, a relation historique, appeared in 1860 (Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labours, &c., &c., with an Appendix by Mr P. G. Ravenstein, F.R.G.S. London, Trübner and Co.). I venture to suggest that he might reprint with great advantage to African students his various journals, scattered through the numbers of the ‘Church Missionary Intelligencer.’ We want them, however, printed textually, with explanatory notes embodying subsequent information.

Meanwhile the difficulties of East African exploration were complicated by a terrible disaster. M. Maizan, an Ensigne de Vaisseau, resolved to explore the inner lake regions viâ the Zanzibar coast, and in 1844 his projects were approved of by his government. After the rains of 1845 he landed at the little settlement Bagamoyo, and when barely three days from the seaboard, he was brutally murdered at the village of Dege la Mhora, by one P’hazi Mazungéra, chief of the Wakamba, a sub-tribe of the Wazaramo. The distinguished hydrographer Captain Guillain was sent in the brig of war Le Decouëdic, to obtain satisfaction for this murder, and the following sentence concludes his remarks upon the subject (Chap. 1, pp. 17-20); ‘Tout ce que je veux, tout ce que je dois me rappeler de Maizan, c’est qu’il était intelligent, instruit, courageux, et qu’il a péri misérablement à la fleur de l’âge (æt. 26) au début d’une enterprise ou il aurait pu rencontrer la gloire.’ I have also described (Lake Regions of Central Africa, 1. Chap. 3), from information collected on the spot, the young traveller’s untimely end; and it is still my opinion that the foul murder was caused more or less directly by the Christian merchants of Zanzibar. Dr Krapf’s account of the catastrophe (Travels, p. 421) abounds in errors. Captain Guillain was also sent on a kind of bagman’s tour, a hawker carrying echantillons of French cloth and other produce offered to the Arab market. Mayotta having been ceded in 1841 by the Sakalawa chief, Andrian Souli, to the French government, which occupied it militarily in 1843, the first idea was to make of it a second and a more civilized Zanzibar. The coasting voyages and a few short inland trips were thought worthy of being published in three bulky volumes (Documents sur l’Histoire, la Géographie, et la Commerce de l’Afrique Orientale, recuellis et rédigés par M. Guillain, &c.; publiés par ordre du Gouvernement. Paris, Bertrand). The additions to Captain Owen’s survey are unimportant, but the French officer has diligently collected ‘documents pour servir,’ which will be useful when a history of the coast shall be written. The worst part of the book is the linguistic; a sailor, however, passing rapidly through or along a country, can hardly be expected to learn much of the language.

Meanwhile an important theory concerning the Nile Sources was published by my friend, Dr Charles T. Beke. He had surveyed and explored (Nov. 1840-May 1843) the Abyssinian plateau and the lowlands near the Red Sea, and he had determined the water-parting of the streams which feed the Nile and the Indian Ocean (Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xii). Whilst Ritter (Erdkunde) and other geographers made the White River rise between N. lat. 7° and 8° and even 11°, whilst Messrs Antoine d’Abbadie and Ayrton were searching for the Coy Fountains in Enaria and Kaffa (N. lat. 7° 49′ and E. long. 36° 2′ 9″); and whilst Mr James Macqueen located ‘the sources of the chief branch of the Bahr-el-abiad in about N. lat. 3°’ (Preface xxiv. Geographical Survey of Africa, London, Fellowes, 1840), and ‘at no great distance from the equator’ (Ibid. 235), Dr Beke announced at the Swansea meeting of the British Association, that he would carry the Caput Nili to S. lat. 2°-3° and E. long. 34°; moreover that he would place it ‘at a comparatively short distance from the sea coast, within the dominions of the Imam of Maskat.’ Rightly judging the eastern coast to be the easiest road into central intertropical Africa, Dr Beke, then secretary to the Geographical Society of London, collected a subscription[subscription] for exploring the Nile Sources, viâ Zanzibar, and sent out Dr Friedrich Bialloblotsky to attempt the discovery. This Professor of Hebrew and literary man presented in February 1849 his credentials to H. M. the Sayyid and to Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton. The latter, backed by Dr Krapf, sent back the explorer to Egypt, without allowing him even to set foot upon the East African shore, and he was justified in so doing. The recent murder of M. Maizan had thrown the coast into confusion, the assassin was at large, and the motives which prompted the deed were still actively at work within the Island of Zanzibar. Dr Bialloblotsky could speak no eastern tongue, at least none that was intelligible in S. Africa; he was completely untrained to travel, he collected ‘meteoric’ dust during a common storm at Aden—magno cum risu of the Adenites; he did not know the difference between a sextant and a quadrant, and he asked Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton what a young cocoanut was.

Dr Beke, in his character of ‘Theoretical Discoverer of the Nile Sources,’ has published the following studies.

‘On the Nile and its Tributaries,’ a statement of his then novel views (Oct. 28, 1846, and printed in the Journal Royal Geographical Society, vols, xvii., xviii. of 1847-8). ‘The Sources of the Nile: being a General Survey of the Basin of that River, and of its Head-streams, with the History of Nilotic Discovery’ (London, Madden, 1860). The appendix contains a summary of Dr Bialloblotsky’s projected journey.

‘On the Mountains forming the eastern side of the Basin of the Nile, and the origin of the designation, “Mountains of the Moon,” applied to them.’ This paper, being refused by the Royal Geographical Society, was read (August 30, 1861) before the British Association at Manchester.

‘Who discovered the Sources of the Nile?’ A letter to Sir Roderick I. Murchison (Madden, Leadenhall-street, 1863).

‘On the Lake Kurá of Arabian Geographers and Cartographers.’ This paper argues that the equatorial Lake Kura-Kawar, drawn by an Arab, and published in Lelewel’s “Geographie du Moyen Age,” represents the lakes and marshes of N. lat. 9°.

Dr Beke, it appears, doubly deserves the title ‘Theoretical Discoverer of the Nile Sources.’ He has lately transferred the Caput from S. lat. 2°-3° to S. lat. 10° 30′-11°, and from E. long. 34° to E. long. 18°-19°, making the stream pass through 43° of latitude, and measuring diagonally one-eighth of the circumference of the globe. (‘Solution of the Nile Problem,’ Athenæum, Feb. 5, 1870). The Nile is thus identified with the Kasai, or Kassavi, the Casais of P. J. Baptista (the Pombeiro), the Casati of Douville, the Casasi of M. Cooley, the Cassabe of M. J. R. Graça, the Kasaby of Mr Macqueen, and the Kasye or Loke of Dr Livingstone. These ‘New Sources’ are in the ‘primæval forests of Olo-Vihenda and Djikoe or Kibokoe (the Quiboque of the Hungarian officer Ladislaus Magyar), in the Mossamba Mountains, about 300 miles from the coast of Benguela. Mr Keith Johnston, jun. believes that the Lufira-Luapula river is the lower course of the Kassavi or Kassabi, which is usually made to rise in S. lat. 12°, near the Atlantic seaboard, and after flowing N. E. and N. as far as about S. lat. 8°, to turn eastward instead of continuing to the N. W. and W. He makes it, however, the true head of the Congo, not of the Nile.

Amongst minor explorations, I may mention that of Mr Henry C. Arcangelo, who in 1847 ascended the Juba or Govind River. It is, however, doubtful how far his explorations extended. He was followed in 1849 by Captain Short. In November, 1851, a party of three Moors or Zanzibar Arabs landed at ‘Bocamoio’ (the Bagamoyo roadstead village where M. Maizan disembarked), travelled with 40 carriers to the Lake ‘Tanganna’ (Tanganyika), crossed it in a boat which they built, visited the Muata Cazembe, and reached, after six months, the Portuguese Benguela. The late Mr Consul Brand communicated, through the Foreign Office, this remarkable journey, in which Africa had been crossed, with few difficulties, from sea to sea, and it excited the attention of the Royal Geographical Society (Journal, vol. xxiv. of 1854).

In 1852 Sir Roderick I. Murchison propounded his theory of the basin-shaped structure of the African interior. This was an important advance upon the great plateau of Lacépède (Mémoire, etc., dans les Annales du Musée de l’Histoire Nat., vi. 284), and it abolished the gardens and terraces of Ritter (Erdkunde, le Plateau ou la Haute Afrique). About the same time Col. Sykes recommended that an expedition be sent from Mombasah to explore the ‘Arcanum Magnum,’ opining that the discovery of Kilima-njaro and Kenia had limited the area of the head-waters between S. lat. 2°-4° and E. long. (G.) 32°-36°, almost exactly the southernmost position of the Nyanza Lake. In March, 1855, Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton forwarded concise but correct notices, ‘On various points connected with the H.M. Imam of Muskat,’ which was published in the Bombay Selections (No. 24). In Dec. 10, 1855, followed Mr James Macqueen’s paper on the ‘Present state of the Geography of some parts of Africa (read at the Royal Geographical Society, April 8 and June 10, 1850), with ‘Notes on the Geography of Central Africa,’ taken from the researches of Livingstone, Monteiro, Graça, and others (Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xxvi. 109). They show great critical ability. The map accompanying the memoir separated the ‘Tanganyenka’ from the Nyassa Lake; moreover, it disposed the greater axes of these several waters as they should be, nearly upon a meridian. Maps still suffered from that incubus the N’yassi or Single Sea, stretching between S. lat. 7°-12°, and distorted by its ‘historien géographe’ from the N. S. position occupied by the half-dozen lakes which compose it[^[16]] to a N. W. and S. E. rhumb. As afterwards appeared, Mr Macqueen had confused the Tanganyika and Nyanza waters by placing the centre of the former in long. (G.) 29°. This, however, was not suspected when my excellent and venerable friend gave me the rough proofs of his paper, which travelled with me into Central Africa. Mr Macqueen has also done good by editing (Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xxx.) the Journeys of Silva Porto with the Arabs from Benguela to Ibo and Mozambique, and by other labours too numerous to be specified.

A pause in East African exploration followed the departure of Dr Krapf. M. Erhardt, whose project of entering viâ Kilwa was not supported, had joined his brother missionaries in India. M. Rebmann alone remained at Rabai Mpia. And whilst under H. H. Abbas Pasha a large and complete Egypto-European expedition was, after the old fashion, organized to ascend the stream, ‘ad investigandum caput Nili’ (Seneca, Nat. Quæst. vi. 8), the new and practicable route from the Zanzibar coast seemed to have been clean forgotten.

During this lull we landed, as the reader has been told in the last chapter, upon the African isle ‘Menouthias.’

NOTE.

I may be excused in here alluding to an assertion often repeated by the ‘Geographer of N’gassi,’ in his Memoir on the ‘Lake Regions of East Africa reviewed’ (London, Stanford, 1864). He makes me ‘the easy dupe of the most transparent personal hostility, which wore the respectable mask of the Royal Geographical Society,’ and he assures me that I left England ‘indoctrinated’ as to what lake or lakes I should find in Central Africa, and so forth.

This fretfulness of mortified vanity would not have been noticed by me had it not been so unfair to the Royal Geographical Society. In the preface of my Memoir (pp. 4-8, Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xxix.), I was careful to print all the instructions of the Expeditionary Committee, and I only regretted that they were not more detailed. It is absurd to assert of a traveller that he ‘visited the lake regions with a confirmed inclination to divide the lake.’ What interest can he have in bringing home any but the fullest and most exact details? The petty differences between himself and the Royal Geographical Society, which Mr Cooley assumes all the world to know, were utterly unknown to me when I left England in 1856; and, greatly despising such things, I have never since inquired into the subject. Returning home in 1859, I learned with surprise that the Comparative Geographer’ still stood upon his ‘Single Sea,’ and considered any one who dared to make two or three of it his personal enemy. That such should be the mental state of a gentleman who has not, they say, taken leave of his wits, was a phenomenon which justified my wonder; nor could I believe it till the pages of the Athenæum proceeded to give me proof positive. It is melancholy to see a laborious literary man, whose name might stand so high, thus display the caput mortuum of his intellect.

P.S. Another mortuary notice! My good old friend Mr Macqueen has also passed away at a ripe age, leaving behind him the memory of a laborious and useful life, especially devoted to the cause of Africa and the Africans.

CHAPTER IV.
A STROLL THROUGH ZANZIBAR CITY.

‘E dahi se foi à Ilha de Zanzibar, que he aquèm de Mombaça vinte leguas e tão pegada à terra firma que as náos que passarem per entre ellas, hão de ser vistas.’—De Barros, 1, vii. 4.

And first of the Port.

Zanzibar harbour is a fine specimen of the true Atoll, barrier or fringing reef, built upon a subsiding foundation, probably of sandstone. The original lagoon, charged with sediment and washings from the uplands, must have burst during some greater flood, and split into narrow water-ways the one continuous coralline rim. The same influences may account for the gaps in the straight-lined reef whose breach gave a name to Brazilian Pernambuco.

The port varies in depth from 9 to 13 fathoms, with overfalls, and the rise of the tide is 13 feet. Here the Hormos Episalos (statio fluctuosa, or open roadstead of the Periplus, chap. 8) has been converted into a basin by the industry of the lithophyte. These ants of the ocean have built up an arc of

‘Sea-girt isles,

That, like to rich and various gems, inlay

The unadorned bosom of the deep.’

There is a front harbour and a back bay. The latter enables ships landing cargo to avoid the heavy swell of the N.E. monsoon. The two are separated by Ras Changáni[^[17]]—Sandy Point. The name, corrupted to Shangany, has attached itself in our charts to the whole city.

These coral-based islet clumps are readily made in these seas. The rough ridges of a ‘wash,’ where currents meet, are soon heaped with sea-weed, with drift-wood, and with scatters of parasitical testaceæ, which decaying form a thin but fruitful soil. Seeds brought by winds, waves, and birds then germinate; and matter, animal as well as vegetable, is ever added till a humus-bed is formed for thick shrubbery and trees. Unless deposition and vegetation continue to bind the rock, it is liable to be undermined by the sea, when it forms banks dangerous to navigation.

Dr Ruschenberger, repeated by a modern traveller, informs us that there are ‘four minor reefs, looking like great arks, whose bows and sterns hang bushing over the waters.’ As all the plans show, there are five. The northernmost link of the broken chain is Champáni (not ‘Chapany’), the Isle des Français of French charts. It became a God’s-acre for Europeans, whose infidel corpses here, as at Maskat, and in ancient Madeira before the days of Captain Cook, had during less latitudinarian times the choice of the dunghill of the cove, or of a hole in the street. Formerly it was frequented by turtle-fishers and egg-seekers: ‘black Muhogo,’[^[18]] however, has been scared away by visions of fever-stricken, yellow-faced ghosts rising ghastly from the scatter of Christian graves. The bit of sandy bush, distinguished from its neighbours by absence of tall trees, is frequented (1857) by naval and commercial Nimrods, with ‘shooting irons’ and ‘smelling dogs,’ curs with clipped ears and shorn tails, bought from bumboat men: en bon chasseurs, they shoot the Sayyid’s little antelopes which troop up expecting food; and sometimes these sportsmen make targets of certain buff-coloured objects imperfectly seen through the bushes. The mouldering sepulchres in their neglected clearings make the prospect of a last home here peculiarly unsavoury, almost as bad as in Brazilian Santos. Yet there are traditions of French picnics visiting it to eat monkey—a proceeding which might have been interrupted en ville.

Westward the line of natural breakwaters is prolonged by Kibondiko, Le Ponton, or the Hulk. A mere mass of jungle, it has never been utilized. The eye, however, rests with pleasure upon the sheet of sparkling foam tumbling white over its coralline outliers, backed by dark purple-blue distance, and fronted by tranquil, leek-green shoal water. Connected with its neighbour by a reef practicable at low tides, it is separated from Changu, or Middle Island, by ‘French channel,’ deep enough for men-of-war. The shoals about it supply a small rock-oyster. The Crustacea, however, is uncultivated, and amongst Moslems it is escargot to the typical John Bull.

The most important is Báwi or Turtle Island, a low, dry bank, slightly undulated, with a beautifully verdant undergrowth, fringed and tasseled with the tallest cocoas. The Chelonian (K’hasa) of the East coast, eaten in April and May, by no means equals that of Fernando Po or of Ascension; moreover, here no man is master of the art and mystery of developing callipash and callipee. Turtle, cooked by a ‘cook-boy,’ suggests the flesh of small green Saurians (Susmár), which the haughty Persians of Firdausi thus objected to their Semitic neighbours—

‘Can the Arab’s greed thus have grown so great,

From his camels’ milk and his lizards’ meat,

That he casts on Kayyanian crowns his eye?

Fie on thee! thou swift-rolling world, O fie!’

The tortoise-shell, so often mentioned in the Periplus as an export from Menouthias (chap. xv.) and Rhapta (chap. xvii.), has until lately been neglected. Like Bombay Calabar, and our Isle of Dogs in the olden time, the few acres of Turtle Island were used to ‘keep antelopes, goats, and other beasts of delight,’ while vicious baboons were deported to it from the city. Below it is the celebrated ‘Harpshell Bank,’ now mercilessly spoiled. Southernmost is Chumbi Island, alias La Passe, which, mistaken for the Turtle, has caused, many a wreck. These mishaps are not always accidental. One day Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton saw, through his glass, the master of a Frenchman deliberately stow himself and his luggage in the gig, put off, and leave his ship to run her nose upon the nearest reef.

These islands form the well-known ‘Passes,’ channels intricate with lithodom-reefs and mollusk-beds. They number four, namely, the northern or English Pass, between Champáni and Zanzibar; the N. W. or French Pass, between Kibondiko and Changu; the great or middle, between Changu and Báwi; and the western, south of Báwi. The principal entrance was buoyed by the late Sayyid, but these precautions soon disappeared. Within the line of break-waters is the anchorage, which may be pronounced excellent; ships ride close to shore in 7 to 8 fathoms, and the area between the islets and the island may be set down at 3·8 square miles. It presents an animated scene. Mosquito fleets of ‘ngaráwa’ or monoxyles cut the wavelets like flying proas, under the nice conduct of the sable fishermen, who take advantage of the calm weather. The northerners from about Brava have retained the broad-brimmed straw hat, big as an average parasol. Like that of Malabar, Morocco, and West Africa, it was adopted by their Portuguese conquerors. The machua or ‘little boats’ of the Lusiads, which De Barros calls ‘Sambucos,’[^[19]] are still the same, except that a disproportioned sail of merkani (American domestics), based upon a pair of outriggers, now supplies the primitive propeller,

‘d’humas folhas de palma bem tecidas.’

The outrigger is rarely neglected. Here and there a giant shark shoots up from the depths, and stares at the fishermen with a cruel, fixed, and colourless eye, that makes his blood run cold. Only the poorest of poor devils will venture into a ‘dug-out,’ which is driven before the wind or paddled with a broad, curved, spoon-like blade. These Matumbi, or hollowed logs, form a curious national contrast with the launches and lighters that land European merchandise; ponderous and solid squares, their build shows nothing graceful or picturesque.

The N. E. monsoon is now (December) doing its duty well, and bringing various native craft from Madagascar, Mozambique, the minor islands of the Indian Ocean, Bombay and Guzerat, the Somali coast, the Red Sea, Maskat, and the Persian Gulf. Numbering 60 to 70, they anchor close in shore—O Semites and Hamites, wondrously apathetic!—where the least sea would bump them to bits. About half a mile outside the ‘country shipping,’ ride, in 5 to 6 fathoms, half a dozen square-rigged merchantmen—Americans, French, and Hamburgers; England is not represented. What with bad water, and worse liquor, the Briton finds it hard to live at Zanzibar. All are awaiting cargoes of copal and ivory, of hides, and of the cowries which we used to call ‘blackamoor’s teeth.’

The quaintest and freshest local build is to us the Mtepe, which the Arabs call Muntafiyah.[^[20]] This lineal descendant of the Ploaria Rhapta (Naviculæ Consutæ, Periplus, chap. 16), that floated upon these seas 20 centuries ago, is a favourite from Lamu to Kilwa. The shell has a beam one-third of its length, and swims the tide buoyantly as a sea-bird. This breadth, combined with elasticity, enables it to stand any amount of grounding and bumping, nor is it ever beached for the S. W. monsoon. It is pegged together, not nailed, and mostly, as the old traveller says, ‘sewn, like clothes, with twine.’ The tapering mast, raking forwards, carries any amount of square matting, by no means air-tight, and the stern is long and projecting, as if amphisbænic. The swan-throat of the arched prow is the cheniscus of the classical galley-stem. Necklaced with strips of hide and bunches of talismans, it bears a red head; and the latter, as in the ark of Osiris and in the Chinese junk, has the round eyes painted white,—possibly, in the beginning holes for hawsers. The ‘Mtepe’ carries from 12 to 20 tons, and can go to windward of everything propelled by wind.

The Badan, from Sur, Sohar, and Maskat, has a standing plank-covering, and being able to make 11 knots an hour is preferred by passengers, Arab loafers, and sorners, one being allowed per ton in short trips. Descried from afar through the haze, her preposterous sail has caused the Zanzibarites to fly their flags in anticipation of home news; nearer, the long, narrow, quoin-shaped craft, with towering stern-post and powerful rudder, like the caudal fin of some monstrous fish, presents an exceptional physiognomy. The uncouth Arab Dau (dow) dates probably from the days of the Phœnicians, and is found all over the Indian Ocean. She ranges from 50 to 500 tons, and her sharp projecting bow makes her deck nearly a quarter longer than the keel, giving her, when under weigh, a peculiar stumbling, shambling, tottering gait. The open poop is a mass of immense outworks, and there is the normal giant steering-tackle, often secured only by lashings: a single mast is stepped a little ahead of amidships; it rakes forward, as is the rule of primitive craft, and it supports a huge square sail of coarse material. The Kidau (small dow) is similar, but with open stern-cabins; it is generally sewn together with coir or rope of cocoa fibre, and caulked with the same. The bottom is paid over with a composition of lime and shark’s-oil, which, hardening under water, preserves the hull from sea-worms. Thus sheathed, ships which have made two feet of leakage become tight as if newly coppered. Similarly, the Irish fishermen coat their craft with marl and oil. Talc and tallow are employed in different parts of Europe: and the Chinese use a putty of oil and burnt gypsum; according to others, a composition of lime and resin of the Tongshu-tree applied over the oakum of bamboo (Astley, 4, 128).

The ‘Grab’ (properly ‘Ghurab,’ meaning a raven) is an overgrown Pattimar. A model of the latter craft, primitive and Hindu, was submitted to the British public during the Great Exhibition. Rigged barque-like, it is wondrous ark-like and uncouth. Baghlahs (she-mules) and Ganjas (Ghancheh), from Cutch, are old tubs with low projecting prows and elevated sterns, elaborately carved and painted. Low down in the fore, their lean bows split like giant wedges the opposing waves, which hiss and seethe as they fly past in broad arrow-heads. Dangerous in heavy seas, these coffins are preserved by popular prejudice for the antique and by the difficulty of choosing other models. Add sundry Batelas, with poop-cabinets, closed and roomy, some with masts struck, others ready to weigh anchor—I am not writing, gentle reader, a report on Moslem naval architecture—and you have an idea of the outlandish fleet, interesting withal, which bethrongs the port of Zanzibar.

The much-puffed squadron of the late Sayyid, stationed during his life at Mto-ni, and now being divided amongst the rival heirs, flanks with its single and double tiers of guns these peaceful traders, of whom, by-the-by, some are desperate pirates. The number is imposing; but the decks have no awnings against the weather, the masts are struck and stripped to save rigging, the yards lie fore-and-aft upon the booms, the crews consist of half-a-dozen thievish, servile ‘sons of water’ (M’áná Májí); rats and cockroaches compose the live stock; the ammunition is nowhere, and though the quarter and main decks are sometimes swept, everything below is foul with garbage and vermin. The exteriors are dingy; the interiors are so thoroughly rotted by fresh water that the ships are always ready to go down at their anchors. The whole thing is a mistake amongst Arabs, who are fitted only for a ‘buggalow,’ or at best a ‘grab.’ The late Sayyid once attempted English sailors, who behaved well as long as they did what they pleased, especially in the minor matters of ’baccy and grog; but when the dark-faced skipper began loud speaking and tall threats, they incontinently thrashed him upon his own quarterdeck, and were perforce ‘dismissed the service.’ Every captain in the R. N. Maskat, besides impudently falsifying the muster-rolls, will steal the fighting-lanterns, the hammocks, and other articles useful at home; whilst the care-takers sell in the bazar, junk, rope, and line; copper bolts, brass-work, and carpenter’s chests bearing the government mark. When a ship is wanted an Arab Nakhoda (here called Náhozá), a Muallim or sailing-master, and a couple of Sukkanis (pilots), are sent on board with a crew composed of a few Arab non-commissioned officers and ‘able seamen,’ Baloch, Maskatis, and slaves. The commander, who receives some 50 dollars per lunar month, kills time with the cognac bottle; the sailing-master (7 dollars) dozes like a lap-dog in his own arm-chair on the quarter-deck; and the seamen do nothing, Jack helping Bill. One of these vessels sent to England a few years ago lost, by want of provisions and bad water, 86 out of its crew—100 men; and can we wonder at it? A single small screw-steamer, carrying a heavy gun, and manned and commanded by Europeans, would have been more efficient in warfare, and far more useful in peace, than the whole squadron of hulks. It is, however, vain to assure the Arab brain that mere number is not might; and, indeed, so it is when people believe in it.

The high and glassless windows of H. M.’s Consulate enable us to prospect the city. Zanzibar, in round, numbers 6° south of the line, occupies the western edge and about the midway length of the coral reef that forms the island. The latter is separated by a Manche or channel from the continent, a raised strip of blue land, broken by tall and remarkable cones all rejoicing in names still mysterious enough to flutter the traveller’s nerves. The inclination of the island from N.N.W. to S.S.E. shelters the harbour from the Indian Ocean, whilst the bulge of the mainland breaks the force of dangerous Hippalus, the S.W. monsoon. The minimum breadth of the Manche is 16 geographical miles; from the Fort to the opposite coast there are 24, and from the bottom of Menai Bay 35. The Periplus gives to the Menouthian Channel about 300 stadia, in round numbers 30 geographical miles: 600 common stadia correspond, within a fraction of the real measurement, with a degree of latitude (1° = 1/360 of the earth’s circumference). Marinus of Tyre and Ptolemy, however, unduly reduced the latter to 500 stadia.

Zanzibar city is built upon a triangular spit, breaking the line of its wide, irregular, and shallow bay. The peninsula is connected with the island by an isthmus some 300 yards wide, and it is backed by swamp and lagoon, bush and forest. Arc-shaped, with the chord formed by the sea-frontage, and the segment of the circle facing landwards, its greatest length is from N.E. to S.W., and it is disposed beachways, like the sea-ports of Oman. The front is a mere ‘dicky,’ a clean show concealing uncleanness. Instead, however, of a neat marine parade and a T-shaped pier, the foreground is a line of sand fearfully impure. Corpses float at times upon the heavy water; the shore is a cess-pool, and the younger blacks of both sexes disport themselves in an absence of costume which would startle even Margate. Round-barrelled bulls, the saints of the Banyans, and therefore called by us ‘Brahmani,’ push and butt, by way of excitement, the gangs of serviles who carry huge sacks of cowries, and pile high their hides and logwood. Others wash and scrape ivory, which suggested to a young traveller the idea that the precious bone, here so plentiful, is swept up by the sea. At night the front often flares as if on fire. The cause is lime-burning on the shore, in small, round, built-up heaps.

Another evil, arising from want of quay and breakwater, is that the sea at times finds its way into the lower parts of the town. The nuisance increases, as this part of the Island appears to be undergoing depression, not an uncommon process in fictile madrepore formations. Off Changáni Point, where in 1823 stood a hut-clump and a mosque, four fathoms of water now roll. The British Consulate, formerly many yards distant from the surf, must be protected by piles and rubble. Some of the larger houses have sunk four, and have sloped nine feet from terrace to ground, owing to the instability of their soppy foundations. The ‘Tree-island’ of our earliest charts has been undermined and carried away bodily by the waves; whilst to the north the sea has encroached upon Mto-ni, where the Sayyid’s flag-staff has four times required removal. On the other hand, about 15 years ago, the ‘Middle Shoal’ of the harbour was awash; now it is high and dry.

In 1835 Dr Ruschenberger estimated the census of Zanzibar at 12,000 souls, of whom two-thirds were slaves. In 1844 Dr Krapf proposed 100,000 as the population of the island, the greater number living in the capital. Captain Guillain, in 1846, gave 20,000 to 25,000, slaves included. I assumed the number, in 1857, as 25,000, which during the N.E. monsoon, when a large floating population flocks in, may rise to 40,000, and even to 45,000. The Consular report of 1849 asserts it to be ‘about 60,000.’

The city is divided into 18 quarters (Mahallat), each having its own name; and when travellers inform us that it is called ‘Hamuz,’ Moafilah, or Baur, they simply take a part for the whole.[^[21]] The west-end boasts the best houses, chiefly those which wealthy natives let to stranger merchants. The Central, or Fort quarter, is the seat of government and of commerce, whilst few foreigners inhabit the eastern extremities, the hottest and the most unhealthy. The streets are, as they should be under such a sky, deep and winding alleys, hardly 20 feet broad, and travellers compare them with the threads of a tangled skein. In the west-end a pavement of Chunam, or tamped lime, is provided with a gutter, which secures dryness and cleanliness—it is the first that I have seen in an African city. As we go eastward all such signs of civilization vanish; the sun and wind are the only engineers, and the frequent green and black puddles, like those of the filthy Ghetto, or Jews’ quarter, at Damascus, argue a preponderance of black population. Here, as on the odious sands, the festering impurities render strolling a task that requires some resolution, and the streets are unfit for a decent (white) woman to walk through. I may say the same of almost every city where the negro element abounds.

As in the coast settlements of the Red Sea and of Madagascar, the house material is wholly coral rag, a substance at once easily worked and durable—stone and lime in one. The irregularity of the place is excessive, and it is by no means easy to describe its peculiar physiognomy. The public buildings are poor and mean. The mosques which adorn Arab towns with light and airy turrets, breaking the monotony of square white tenements, magnified claret-chests, are here in the simplest Wahhabi form. About 30 of these useful, but by no means ornamental, ‘meeting-houses’ are scattered about the city for the use of the ‘established church.’ They are oblong rooms, with stuccoed walls, and matted floors; the flat roofs are supported by dwarf rows of square piers and polygonal columns; whilst Saracenic arches, broad, pointed, and lanceated, and windows low-placed for convenience of expectoration, with inner emarginations in the normal shape of scallops or crescents, divide the interior. Two Shafei mosques, one called after Mohammed Abd el Kadir, the other from Mohammed el Aughan (Afghan), have minarets, dwindled turrets like the steeples of Brazilian villages; another boasts of a diminutive cone, most like an Egyptian pigeon-tower; and a fourth has a dwarf excrescence, suggesting the lantern of a light-house. The Shiahs, who are numerous, meet for prayer in the Kipondah quarter, and the Kojahs have a ruined mosque outside the city.

The best houses are on the Arab plan familiar to travellers in Ebro-land and her colonies. The type has extended to France and even to Galway, where we still find it in the oldest buildings. A dark narrow entrance leads from the street, and the centre of the tenements is a hypæthral quadrangle, the Iberian Patio or Quintal. We miss, however, the shady trees, the sweet flowers, and bright verdure with which the southern European and the Hispano-American beautify their dwellings. Here the ‘Dár’ is a dirty yard, paved or unpaved, usually encumbered with piles of wood or hides, stored for sale, and tenanted by poultry, dogs, donkeys, and lounging slaves. A steep and narrow, dark and dangerous staircase of rough stone, like a companion-ladder, connects it with the first floor, the ‘noble-quarter.’ There are galleries for the several storeys, and doors opening upon the court admit light into the rooms. Zanzibarian architecture, as among ‘Orientals’ generally, is at a low ebb. The masonry shows not a single straight line; the arches are never similar in form or size; the floors may have a foot of depression between the middle and the corners of the room; whilst no two apartments are on the same level, and they seldom open into each other. Joiner’s work and iron-work must both be brought from India.

The ‘azotéas’[^[22]] flat roofs, or rather terraces, are supported by mangrove-trunks, locally called ‘Zanzibar rafters,’ and the walls, of massive thickness, are copiously ‘chunam’d.’ Here the inmates delight to spread their mats, and at suitable seasons to ‘smell the air.’ Bándá or bándáni, pent-roofed huts of plaited palm-leaf (makuti or cajan) garnish the roofs of the native town. Europeans do not patronize these look-outs, fires being frequent and the slaves dangerous. Some foreigners have secured the comfort of a cool night by building upper cabins of planking, and have paid for the enjoyment in rheumatism, ague, and fever.

Koranic sentences on slips of paper, fastened to the entrances, and an inscription cut in the wooden lintel, secure the house from witchcraft, like the crocodile in Egypt; whilst a yard of ship’s cable drives away thieves. The higher the tenement, the bigger the gateway, the heavier the padlock, and the huger the iron studs which nail the door of heavy timber, the greater is the owner’s dignity. All seems ready for a state of siege. Even the little square holes pierced high up in the walls, and doing duty as ventilators, are closely barred. As heat prevents the use of glass in sleeping-rooms, shutters of plain or painted plank supply its place, and persiennes deform the best habitations. The northern European who sleeps for the first time in one of these blockhouses fairly realizes the first sensations of a jail. Of course the object is defence, therefore the form is still common to Egypt and Zanzibar, Syria and Asia Minor.

Arabs here, as elsewhere, prefer long narrow rooms (40 feet × 15 to 20), generally much higher than their breadth, open to the sea-breeze, which is the health-giver; and they close the eastern side-walls against the ‘fever-wind,’ the cool, damp, spicy land-draught. The Sala or reception-hall is mostly on the ground-floor. It contrasts strongly with our English apartments, where the comfortless profusion and confusion of furniture, and where the undue crowding of ornamental ornaments, spoil the proportions and ‘put out’ the eye. The protracted lines of walls and rows of arched and shallow niches, which take the place of tables and consoles, are unbroken save by a few weapons. Pictures and engravings are almost unknown; chandeliers and mirrors are confined to the wealthy; and the result, which in England would be bald and barn-like, here suggests the coolness and pleasing simplicity of an Italian villa—in Italy. A bright-tinted carpet, a gorgeous but tasteful Persian rug for the daïs, matting on the lower floor, which is of the usual chunam; a divan in old-fashioned houses; and, in the best of the modern style, half a dozen stiff chairs of East Indian blackwood or China-work, compose the upholstery of an Arab ‘palazzo.’ In the rooms of the few who can or will afford such trifles, ornaments of porcelain or glassware, and French or Yankee knicknacks fill the niches. Of course the inner apartments are more showily dressed, but these we may not explore.

About half way down the front of the city we debouch upon the ‘Gurayza’ or fort. The material is the usual coral-rag, cemented with lime of the same formation, rudely burnt, and the style as well as the name (Igreja-Ecclesia) recall to mind the Portuguese of the heroic sixteenth century. It is one of those naïve, crenelated structures, flanked by polygonal towers, each pierced for one small gun, and connected by the comparatively low curtains, in which our ancestors put their trust. A narrow open space runs round it, and it is faced by a straight-lined detached battery, commanding the landing, and about 12 yards long. The embrasures of this outwork are so close that the first broadside would blow open the thin wall; and the score of guns is so placed that every bullet striking the fort must send a billet or two into the men that serve them. A ‘place d’armes,’ about 50 feet wide, divides the two, and represents the naval and military arsenal—two dozen iron carronades lying piled to the right of the first entrance, and as much neglected and worm-eaten as though they belonged to our happy colony, Cape Coast Castle. Amongst the guns of different calibre we find a few fine old brass pieces, one of which bears the dint of a heavy blow. They are probably the plunder of Hormuz or of Maskat, where the small matter of a ‘piece of ham wrapped up in paper’[^[23]] caused, in the middle of the seventeenth century, a general massacre of the Portuguese.’

The gateway is the usual intricate barbican. Here in olden times, after the prayers of el Asr (3 p.M.) the governor and three judges, patriarchs with long grey beards, unclean white robes, and sabres in hand, held courts of justice, and distributed rough-and-ready law to peaceful Banyans, noisy negroes, and groups of fierce Arabs. The square bastion projecting from the curtain now contains upper rooms for the Baloch Jemadar (commandant). The ground-floor is a large vestibule, upon whose shady masonry-benches the soldiery and their armed slaves lounge and chat, laugh and squabble, play and chew betel. On the left of the outer gate is a Cajan shed, where native artists are setting up carriages for the guns whose lodging is now the hot ground. The experiment of firing a piece was lately tried; it reared up and fell backwards, smashing its frail woodwork and killing two artillery ‘chattels.’

Travellers have observed that a launch could easily dismantle this stronghold. It was once, the legend runs, attacked and taken by a single ‘Jack,’ for the honour of whose birthplace Europe and America vainly contend. Determined to liberate two brother-tars from the ignoble bilboes, he placed himself at the head of a party consisting of a Newfoundland dog. He fell upon the guard sabre au poing, and, left master of the field, he waved his bandanna in vinous triumph from the battlements. Sad to relate, this Caucasian hero succumbed to Hamitic fraud. The discomfited slaves rallied. Holding a long rope, they ran round and round the enemy, till, wound about like a windlass or a silk cocoon, he was compelled to surrender at discretion.

The interior of the fort is jammed with soldiers’ huts, and divided into courts by ricketty walls. Here, too, is the only jail in Zanzibar. The stocks (Makantarah), the fetters, the iron collars, and the heavy waist-chains, do not prevent black man from conversationizing, singing comic songs, and gambling with pebbles. The same was the case with our gruel-houses—‘Kanji-Khanah,’ vulgò ‘Conjee-Connah’—in British India. The Sepoys laughed at them and at our beards. The Bombay Presidency jail is known to Arabs as El Bistan (El Bostan, the Garden), because the courts show a few shrubs, and with Ishmaelites a ‘Bistan’ has ever an arrière pensée of Paradise. But the most mutinous white salt that ever floored skipper would ‘squirm’ at the idea of a second night in the black-hole of Zanzibar. Such is the Oriental beau-ideal of a prison—a place whose very name should develope the goose-skin, and which the Chinese significantly call ‘hell.’

In my day foreigners visited the prison to see its curio, a poor devil cateran who had beaten the death-drum whilst his headman was torturing M. Maizan. An Arab expedition sent into the interior returned with this wretch, declaring him to be the murderer in chief, and for two years he lay chained in front of the French Consulate. Since 1847 he was heavily ironed to a gun, under a mat-shed, where he could neither stand up nor lie down. The fellow looked fat and well, but he died before our return from the interior in 1859.

Below the eastern bastion of the ‘Gurayza’ is the most characteristic spot in Zanzibar city, the Salt Market, so called from the heaps of dingy saline sand offered for sale by the Maskati Arabs and the Mekranis. Being near the Custom House, it is always thronged, and like the bazars of Cairo and Damascus it gives an exaggerated idea of the population. There are besides this three other ‘Suk.’ The Suk Muhogo, or Manioc market, to the south of the city, supplies the local staff of life. It is the sweet variety of Jatropha, called in the Brazil Aypim, or Macacheira, and known to us as white cassava: it will not make wood-meal, called κατ’ ἔξοχην, farinha, the flour. The poisonous Manioc (Jatropha Manihot) must be soaked in water, or rasped, squeezed, and toasted, to expel its deleterious juice, which the Brazilian ‘Indians,’ and the people of the Antilles, convert by boiling into sugar, vinegar, and cassareep for ‘pepper-pot’—I heard of this ‘black cassava’ in inner East Africa. The Suk Muhogo sells, besides the negro’s daily bread, cloth and cotton, grain and paddy, vegetables, and other provisions. The shops are the usual holes in the wall, raised a foot above the street, and the owners sit or squat, writing upon a knee by way of desk, with the slow, absorbing reed-pen and the clotted clammy fluid called ink. Behind, and hard by, is the fish-market, which is tolerably supplied between 4 and 6 p.m.—in the morning you buy the remnants of the last day. Further eastward, in the Melindini quarter, is the Suk Melindi, where the butchers expose their vendibles. As in most hot countries, the best articles are here sold early, at least before 7 a.m. A scarcity of meat is by no means rare at Zanzibar, and sometimes it has lasted four or five months.

In the Furzani quarter, eastward of and close to the salt bazar, stands the Custom House. This is an Arab bourse, where millions of dollars annually change hands under the foulest of sheds, a long, low mat-roof, supported by two dozen rough tree-stems. From the sea it is conspicuous as the centre of circulation, the heart from and to which twin streams of blacks are ever ebbing and flowing, whilst the beach and the waters opposite it are crowded with shore-boats, big and small. Inland, it is backed by sacks and bales, baskets and packages, hillocks of hides, old ship’s-tanks, piles of valuable woods, heaps of ivories, and a heterogeneous mass of waifs and strays; there is also a rude lock-up, for ware-housing the more valuable goods. A small adjacent square shows an unfinished and dilapidated row of arches, the fragments of a new Custom House. It was begun 26 or 27 years ago (1857), but Jayaram, the benevolent and superstitious Hindu who farmed the customs it is said for $150,000 per annum, had waxed fat under the matting, and was not sure that he would thrive as much within stone and lime. This is a general idea throughout the nearer East. The people are full of saws and instances concerning the downfall of great men who have exposed themselves to the shafts of misfortune by enlarging their gates or by building for themselves two-storeyed abodes. But the hat it seems has lately got the better of the turban, and there will be a handsome new building, half paid by the Prince and half by his farmer of Customs.

An open space now leads us to the finest building in the city, the palace of the late Sayyid, which we visit in a future chapter. I may remark that it is the workhouse style, though hardly so ignoble as that of H. Hellenic Majesty; but at Zanzibar the windows are far higher up, and the jail-like aspect is far more pronounced. Beyond it commences the east-end, and here lives my kind friend M. Cochet, Consul de France. He came, expecting to find civilization, whist in the evening, ladies’ society, and the pianoforte: he had been hoaxed in Paris about Colonel Hamerten’s daughters. He is thoroughly disgusted. Even the Consular residence is the meanest of its kind. No wonder that M. Le Capitaine Guillain was ‘froissé dans son amour-propre national’ when he entered it.

Far better, and more open to the breeze, is the house of the hospitable M. Bérard, agent to Messrs Rabaud Frères, of Marseille. The one disadvantage of the site is the quantity of Khoprá, or cocoa-nut meat, split and sun-dried. It evolves, especially at night-time, a noxious gas, and the strongest stomachs cannot long resist the oily, nausea-breeding odour which tarnishes silver, and which produces fatal dysentery. The Zanzibar trade, with the exception of cloves, is not generally aromatic. Copal, being washed in an over-kept solution of soda, smells not, as was remarked to the ‘Dragon of Wantley,’ like balsam. And ton upon ton of cowries, strewed in the sun, or piled up in huge heaps till the mollusc decays away, can hardly be deemed Sabæan or even commonly wholesome.

To our right, in rear of the fronting ‘dicky,’ and at both flanks of the city, is the native town,—a filthy labyrinth, a capricious arabesque of disorderly lanes, and alleys, and impasses, here broad, there narrow; now heaped with offal, then choked with ruins. It would be the work of weeks to learn the threading of this planless maze, and what white man would have the heart to learn it? Curiosity may lead us to it in earliest morning, before the black world returns to life. During the day sun or rain, mud or dust, with the certain effluvia of carrion and negro, make it impossible to flâner through the foul mass of densely crowded dwelling-places where the slaves and the poor ‘pig’ together. The pauper classes are contented with mere sheds, and only the mildness of the climate keeps them from starving. The meanest hovels are of palm-matting, blackened by wind or sun, thatched with cajan or grass, and with or without walls of wattle-and-dab. They are hardly less wretched than the west Ireland shanty. Internally the huts are cut up into a ‘but’ and a ‘ben,’ and are furnished with pots, gourds, cocoa rasps, low stools hewn out of a single block, a mortar similarly cut, trays, pots, and troughs for food, foul mats, and kitandahs or cartels of palm-fibre rope twisted round a frame of the rudest carpenter’s work. The better abodes are enlarged boxes of stone, mostly surrounded by deep, projecting eaves, forming a kind of verandah on poles, and shading benches of masonry or tamped earth, where articles are exposed for sale. The windows are loop-holes, and the doors are miracles of rudeness. Lastly, there are the wretched shops, which supply the few wants of the population.

We are now at the mouth of the Lagoon, which, at high tides, almost encircles the city. I am told that of late years the natives have built all round this backwater. In 1857 the Eastern or landward side was hush and plantation. As the waters retired they left behind them a rich legacy of fevers and terrible diseases; especially in the inner town, a dead flat, excluded from the sea breeze, and exposed to the pestiferous breath of the maremma.

Ships anchoring off this inlet soon stock French Islet. The whalers and American and Hamburg vessels, that prefer Changáni Point and the west end of the city, often escape without a single case of sickness. Similarly at Havannah, crews exposed to breezes from the Mangrove swamps have lost half their numbers by yellow fever; and the history of our West Indian settlements proves, if proof be required, how fatal is night exposure.

Zanzibar, city and island, is plentifully supplied with bad drinking water. Below the old sea-beach, and near the shore, it is necessary only to scrape a hole in the soft ground. Throughout the interior the wells, though deep, are dry during the hot season, and the people flock to the surface-draining rivulets. West Africans generally will not drink rain-water for fear of dysentery; and so with us—when showers fell in large drops men avoided it, or were careful to consume it soon lest it should putrefy. The purest element is found at Kokotoni, a settlement on the N. W. coast of the island, and in the Bububu, a settlement some five miles north of the city, where Sayyid Suleyman bin Hamid, once governor of Zanzibar, had a small establishment, and where Hasan bin Ibrahim built a large house called Chuweni or Leopard’s Place. So at São Paulo de Loanda the drinking water must be brought from the Bengo river. The best near the city is from a spring which rises behind the royal Cascine, Mto-ni. Here the late Sayyid built a stone tank and an aqueduct 2000 yards long, which, passing through his establishment, came out upon the beach. Casks could then be filled by the hose, but soon the masonry channel got out of repair, and sailors will not willingly drink water flowing through a dwelling-house.

The produce of the town greatly varies. Some wells are hard with sulphate and carbonate of lime, whilst others are salt as the sea itself; and often, as in Sind and Cutch, of two near together one supplies potable and the other undrinkable water. A few to the south of the city are tolerably sweet. The pits are numerous, and a square shaft, usually from 12 to 15 feet deep, may be found at every 40 or 50 yards. There are no casings; the edges are flush with the filthy ground about them, and the sites must frequently be changed, as the porosity of the coral rock and the regular seaward slope direct the drainage into them. Similarly, nearer home the bright sparkling element is not unfrequently charged with all the seeds of disease. When rain has not fallen for some time the water becomes thick as that of a horsepond, and when allowed to stand it readily taints. I could hardly bear to look at the women as they filled with cocoa-shells the jars to be carried off upon their heads.

Formerly Europeans were not allowed, for religious reasons, to ship water from the wells near the town. Also, cask-filling was carried on at low tide, to prevent the supply of the Mto-ni being brackish, and the exhalations of the black mud were of course extra-dangerous. It is no wonder that dysentery and fever resulted from the use of such a ‘necessary.’ The French frigate Le Berceau, after watering here, was visited by the local pest, and lost 90 men on her way home. Even in January, the most wholesome month, Lieut. Christopher had 16 deaths amongst his scanty crew. In this case, however, the lancet, so fatal near the Line, and the deadly Zerámbo, or toddy-brandy, were partly to blame. As early as 1824 Captain Owen condemned the supply of Zanzibar, as liable to cause dysentery. It has this effect during and after heavy rains, unless allowed to deposit its animal and vegetable matter. During the second visit of H. M. S. Andromache, in August, 1824, Commander Nourse and several of his officers spent one night in a country house, after which the former and the greater number of the latter died. The water, as well as the air, doubtless tended to cause the catastrophe. In the dry season the element sometimes produces, according to natives and strangers, obstinate costiveness. Between Zanzibar and the Cape, five brigs lost collectively 125 men from fever, dysentery, and inflammation of the neck of the vesica; whilst others were compelled to start their casks, and to touch at different ‘aguadas’ en route. Hence skippers learned to fear and shun Zanzibar. During her 14 months’ exploration of the island and the coast the Ducouëdic lost 16 men; and to keep up a crew of 122 to 128, no less than 226 hands were transferred to her from the naval division of Bourbon and Madagascar. Each visit to Unguja was followed by an epidemic attack. Formerly as many as seven whalers lay in harbour at one time; now (1857) they prefer to water and refresh at Nossi-beh, Mayotta, and especially at the Seychelles, a free port, with a comparatively cool and healthy climate, where supplies are cheap and plentiful.

Besides the lagoon and the water nuisances there is yet another. The drainage of the Zanzibar water-front is good, owing to the slope of the site seaward. But at low tides, and after dark, when the sulphuretted hydrogen is not raised from the sands by solar heat, a veil of noxious gas overhangs the shore, whose whole length becomes exceedingly offensive. This is caused by the shironi (latrinæ) opening upon the water edge. ‘Intermural sepulture’ is also here common, though not after the fashion of West African Yoruba; and the city contains sundry unenclosed plots of ground, in which dwarf lime-plastered walls, four to five feet long, fancifully terminated above, and showing, instead of epitaph, a china saucer or bits of porcelain set in the stone, denote tombs.

Drainage and cleanliness are panaceas for the evils of malaria where tropical suns shine. Drainage of swamps and lagoons can improve S’a Leone, and can take away the stink from South African barracks. Zanzibar city, I contend, owes much of its fatality to want of drainage, and it might readily be drained into comparative healthiness. But the East African Arab holds the possibility of pestilence and the probability of fever to be less real evils than those of cutting a ditch, of digging a drain, or of opening a line for ventilation. The Dollar-hunters from Europe are a mere floating population, ever looking to the deluge in prospect, and of course unwilling to do every man’s business, that is—to drain.

Such was Zanzibar city when I first walked through it. Though dating beyond the days of Arab history, and made, by its insular and central situation, the depôt of the richest trade in Eastern Africa, its present buildings are almost all modern. At the beginning of this our nineteenth century it consisted of a fort and a ragged line of huts, where the ‘Suk Muhogo’ now stands. Dr Ruschenberger (1835) satisfied himself that ‘the town of Zanzibar and its inhabitants possess as few attractions for a Christian stranger as any place and people in the wide world.’ As late as 1842 this chief emporium of a most wealthy coast boasted but five store-houses of the humblest description, and the east end was a palm plantation. Since my departure the city, as the trade returns show, has, despite unfavourable political circumstances, progressed. A Catholic mission, sent by France, has established an hospital, and two schools for boys and girls, and the English Central African Mission has followed suit. These establishments must differ strangely from the normal thing—the white-bearded pedagogue, hugging his bones or rocking himself before a large chintz-covered copy of the Koran, placed upon a stand two feet high, so as to be above man’s girdle, and, when done with, swathed in cloth and stowed away. A change, too, there must be in the pupils; formerly half a dozen ragged boys, some reciting with nasal monotonous voices sentences to be afterwards understood by instinct, others scraping the primitive writing-board with a pointed stick.

We will now return to the centre of attraction, the Salt Bazar, and prospect the people. The staple material is a double line of black youth and negresses sitting on the ground, with legs outstretched like compasses. At each apex of the angle is a little heap of fruit, salt, sugar, sun-dried manioc, greasy fritters, redolent fish, or square ‘fids’ of shark-flesh,[^[24]] the favourite ‘kitchen’ with Wasawahíli and slaves; it brings from Maskat and the Benadir a goût so high that it takes away the breath. These vendors vary the tedium of inaction by mat-making, plaiting leaves, ‘palavers,’ and ‘pow-wows,’ which argue an admirable conformation of the articulating organs and a mighty lax morality. Sellers, indeed, seem here to double the number of buyers, and yet somehow buying and selling goes on.

Motley is the name of the crowd. One officer in the service of His Highness stalks down the market followed by a Hieland tail, proudly, as if he were lord of the three Arabias. Negroes who dislike the whip clear out like hawk-frightened pigeons. A yellow man, with short, thin beard, and high, meagre, and impassive features, he is well-dressed and gorgeously armed. Observe that he is ‘breek-less’: trowsers are ‘un-Arab,’ and unpopular as were the servile braccæ amongst the Romans. The legs, which, though spare are generally muscular and well-turned, appear beneath the upper coat, which falls to the knee. He adheres to the national sandals, thick soles of undyed leather, with coloured and spangled straps over the instep, whilst a narrow thong passes between the big toe and its neighbour. The foot-gear gives him that peculiar strut which is deemed dignified, and if he has a long walk before him—a very improbable contingency—he must remove his chaussure. I never yet saw a European who could wear the sandal without foot-chafing.

Right meek by the side of the Arab’s fierceness appears the Banyan, the local Jew. These men are Bhattias from Cutch in western India; unarmed burghers, with placid, satisfied countenances, and plump, sleek, rounded forms, suggesting the idea of happy, well-to-do cows. Such is the effect of a diet which embraces only bread, rice, and milk, sweetmeats, vegetables, and clarified butter. Their skins are smoother and their complexions are lighter than the Arabs’; their features are as high though by no means so thin. They wear the long mustachio, not the beard, and a Chinese pig-tail is allowed to spring from the poll of the carefully shaven head. These top-knots are folded, when the owners are full-dressed, under high turbans of spotted purple or crimson stuff edged with gold. The latter are complicated affairs, somewhat suggesting the oldest fashion of a bishop’s mitre; bound round in fine transverse plaits, not twisted like the Arabs’, and peaked in the centre above the forehead with a manner of horn. Their snowy cotton coats fit close to the neck, like collarless shirts; shawl-girt under the arms, they are short-waisted as the dresses of our grandmothers; the sleeves are tight and profusely wrinkled, being nearly double the needful length, and the immaculate loin-cloth displays the lower part of the thigh, leaving the leg bare. Their slippers of red leather are sharp-toed, with points turning upwards and backwards, somewhat as in the knightly days of Europe.

Another conspicuous type is the Baloch mercenary from Mekran or Maskat. A comely, brown man, with regular features, he is distinguished from the Arab by the silkiness and the superior length of his flowing beard, which is carefully anointed after being made glossy with henna and indigo. He adheres to his primitive matchlock, a barrel lengthened out to suit the weak powder in use, damascened with gold and silver, and fastened to the frail stock by more metal rings than the old French ‘Brown Bess’ ever had. The match is about double the thickness of our whipcord, and is wound in many a coil round the stalk or stock. A curved iron, about four inches long, and forked in the upper part to hold the igniter, plays in a groove cut lengthways through the wood and the trigger, a prolongation of the match-holder, guides the fire into the open priming-pan. When the match is not immediately wanted it is made fast to a batten under the breeching. (A parenthesis. Were I again to travel in wet tropical lands, I should take with me two flint-guns, which could, if necessary, be converted into matchlocks. Of course they would shoot slow, but they would not want caps, and they would prove serviceable when the percussion gun and the breech-loader would not.) This mercenary carries also two powder-gourds, one containing coarse material for loading, the other a finer article, English, if possible, for priming. He is never without flint, steel, and tinder; and disposed about his person are spare cartridges in reed cases. His sabre is of the Persian form; his dagger is straighter and handier than that of the Arab; and altogether his tools, like his demeanour, are those of a disciplined, or rather of a disciplinable, man.

The wildest and most picturesque figures are the half-breeds from the western shores of the Persian Gulf—light brown, meagre Ishmaels and Orsons, who look like bundles of fibre bound up in highly-dried human skin. Their unkempt elf-locks fall in mighty masses over unclean, saffron-stained shirts, which suggest the ‘night-gown’ of other days, and these are apparently the only articles of wear. Their straight, heavy swords hang ever ready by a strap passing over the left shoulder; their right hands rest lovingly upon the dagger-hafts, and their small round targes of boiled hippopotamus hide—one of the ‘industries’ of Zanzibar—apparently await immediate use. Leaning on their long matchlocks, they stand cross-legged, with the left foot planted to the right of the right, or vice versâ, and they prowl about like beasts of prey, as they are, eyeing the peaceful, busy crowd with a greedy cut-throat stare, or with the suspicious, side-long glance of a cat o’ mountain.

These barbarian ‘Gulf Arabs’ differ singularly from the muscular porters of Hazramaut, in whose Semitic blood there is a palpable African mixture. They hobble along in pairs, like the Hammals of Constantinople, carrying huge bales of goods and packs of hides suspended from a pole, ever chaunting the same monotonous grunt-song, and kicking out of the way the humped cows that are munching fruit and vegetables under the shadow of their worshippers, the Banyans. Add half a dozen pale-skinned ‘Khojahs,’ tricky-faced men with evil eyes, treacherous smiles, fit for the descendants of the ‘Assassins,’ straight, silky beards, forked after the fashion of ancient Rustam, and armed with Chinese umbrellas. Complete the group by throwing in a European—how ghastly appears his blanched face, and how frightful his tight garb!—stalking down the streets in the worst of tempers, and using his stick upon the mangy ‘pariah dogs’ and the naked shoulders of the ‘niggers’ that obstruct him. At times the Arabs, when their toes or heels are trampled upon, will turn and fiercely finger their daggers; but a fear which is by no means personal prevents their going further.

Such is the aristocracy of the land. As in all servile societies, every white man (i.e. non-negro) is his white neighbour’s equal; whilst the highest black man (i.e. servile) ranks below the lowest pale-face.

Far more novel to us is the slave population, male and female. What first strikes every stranger is the scrupulous politeness and the ceremonious earnestness of greetings when friends meet. The idea of standing in the broiling sun to dialogue as follows is not a little remarkable:

• _A._ Yambo (pronounced Dyambo) or Hali gáná?—The state!
• _B._ Yambo Sáná—My state is very (good).
• _A._ Siyambo (or amongst the Arabized Wasawahíli, Marhabá)—Right welcome!
• _B._ Hast thou eaten and slept?
• _A._ I have made my reverential bow!
• _B._ Yambo?
• _A._ Siyambo Sáná!
• _B._ Like unto gold?
• _A._ Like unto gold!
• _B._ Like unto coral?
• _A._ Like unto coral!
• _B._ Like unto pearl?
• _A._ Like unto pearl!
• _B._ The happiness—Kua-heri! (farewell!).
• _A._ In happiness let us meet, if Allah please!
• _B._ Hem!
• _A._ Hem! (drawn out as long as possible).

The fact is they are going about ‘Ku amkía,’ to salute their friends, and to waste time by running from house to house. Even freemen generally begin their mornings thus, and idle through the working hours.

The males tie, for only garb, a yard of cotton round the waist, and let it fall to the knees; bead necklaces and similar trash complete the costume. Like all negroes they will wear, if possible, the shock-head of wool, which is not pierceable by power of any sun; and they gradually unclothe down to the feet, which, requiring most defence, are the least defended—‘Fashion’ must account for the anomaly. To the initiated eye the tattoo distinguishes the vast confusion of races. The variety of national and tribal marks, the stars, raised lumps and scars, the beauty-slashes and carved patterns, further diversified by the effects of pelagra, psoris, and small-pox, is a Chinese puzzle to the new-comer. Domestic slaves, bearing their burdens on the head, not on the shoulder, are known by a comparatively civilized aspect. They copy their masters, and strangers remark that the countenance is cheerful and not destitute of intelligence. The Bozals, or freshly-trapped chattels, are far more original and interesting. See those Nyassa-men, with their teeth filed to represent the cat or the crocodile, chaffing some old Shylock, an Arab dealer in human flesh and blood; or those wild Uzegura-men, with patterned skins and lower incisors knocked out, like the Shilluks to the west of the Nile, scowling evilly, and muttering curses at the Nakhuda (skipper) from Súr, the professional kidnapper of their kind.

The ‘fairer’ half of black world is not less note-worthy. There is the tall and sooty-skinned woman from Uhiáo, distinguished by the shape of her upper lip. A thorn-pierced hole is enlarged with stalks of green reed till it can admit a disk of white-painted wood nearly as big as a dollar. The same is the system of the Dors, the tribe dwelling north of the equator and west of the Nile; their lip-plates equal the thick end of a cheroot; and the ‘pelele’ of the southern regions is a similar disk of bamboo, ivory, or tin, which causes the upper lip to project some two inches beyond the nose-tip, giving it an anserine proportion. In the elder women the ornament is especially hideous. As a rule, the South American ‘Indians’ pierce for their labrets the lower lip, evidently the more unclean fashion—no wonder that kissing (should I say osculation?) is unknown. Yet even amongst the Somal, if you attempt to salute a woman—supposing that you have the right—she will draw back in horror from the act of incipient cannibalism. Often the lip-disk is absent, and then through the unsightly gap a pearly tooth is seen to gleam, set off by the outer darkness of ‘Spoonbill’s’ skin. This woman, broad-shouldered and thick-waisted, is almost as stalwart as her Mhiás, whose tattoo (chale) is a single line forked at both ends:[^[25]] in others the cuticle and cutis are branded, worked, and raised in an intricate embroidery over all the muscular trunk. An abnormal equality of strength and stature between the sexes prevails amongst many African tribes, especially the agricultural, where women are the workers. The same may be observed in parts of North Britain and of northern Europe. The difference in this matter between the Teutonic and the Latin races never struck me so strongly as when seeing German families land at Rio de Janeiro.

The half-caste Zanzibar girl enviously eyes the Arab woman, a heap of unwashed cottons on invisible feet, with the Maskat masque exposing only her unrecognizable eyeballs. The former wears a single loose piece of red silk or chequered cotton. Her frizzly hair is twisted into pigtails; her eyelids are stained black; her eye-brows are lengthened with paint; her ear-rims are riddled with a dozen holes to admit rings, wooden buttons, or metal studs, whilst the slit lobes, distended by elastic twists of coloured palm-leaf, whose continual expansion prodigiously enlarges the aperture, are fitted with a painted disk, an inch and a half in diameter. The same device was practised (according to the missionary Gumilla) by the Aberne tribe of the Orinoco. If pretty, and therefore wealthy, she wears heavy silver earrings run through the shell of the ear; her thumbs have similar decorations, and massive bangles of white metal adorn, like manacles and fetters, her wrists and ancles. One wing of her nose is bored to admit a stud—even the patches of Europe were not more barbarous. The Zanzibarian slave girl shaves her head smooth, till it shows brown and shiny like a well-polished cocoa-nut; and she drags along her ‘hopeful’—she has seldom more than one—a small black imp, wholly innocent of clothing. The thing already carries on its head a water-jar bigger than its own ‘pot-belly,’ and it screams Ná-kujá (I come!) to other small fry disporting itself more amusingly.

CHAPTER V.
GEOGRAPHICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL.

‘To my surprise, the information concerning Zanzibar and the N. E. coast of Africa ... scarcely contains meagre phrases destitute of precision.’—(Col. Sykes’ Journal, R. G. S., vol. xxiii. 1853.) He forgets that entering from the coast is like jumping from the street into the window.—(R. F. B.)

Section 1.

Africa, East and West—‘Zanzibar’ explained—Menouthias—Position and Formation—The East African Current—Navigation—Aspect of the Island.

It is an old remark that Africa, the continent which became an island by the union of the twin seas in the year of grace 1869, despite her exuberant wealth and her wonderful powers of reproduction, is badly made—a trunk without limbs, a monotonous mass of painful symmetry, wanting opposition and contrast, like the uniform dark complexion of her sons and of her fauna—a solid body, like her own cocoa-nut, hard to penetrate from without, and soft within; an ‘individual of the earth,’ self-isolated by its savagery from the rest of the world. This is especially true of intertropical Africa.

The western coast was, until the last four centuries, cut off from intercourse with mankind by the storm-lashed waters of the northern approach; and to the present day the unbroken seaboard, so scanty in good harbours, and the dangerous bars and bores which defend the deadly river mouths, render it the least progressive part of the old world.

The more fortunate north-eastern and subtropical shores were enabled by their vast crévasse, the Red and riverless Sea, to communicate with Western Asia, whilst the rich productions, gold and ivory, tortoise-shell and ambergris, the hot sensuous climate—which even now induces the northern sailor to ship in the fatal West African squadron—and the amene scenery of the equatorial regions, invited, during pre-historic ages, merchants, and even immigrants, from rugged Persia and sterile Arabia.

Between the two upper coasts, eastern and western, there is, as might be expected, great similarity of grim aspect. The northern seaboards offer, for the space of a thousand miles, the same horrid aspect; deceitful roadsteads and dangerous anchorages, forbidding lines of chalky cliff and barren brown sandstone bluff; flat strands and white downs, hazed over by the spray of desert sand; and lowlands backed by maritime sub-ranges, masses of bald hill and naked mountains, streaked with dry wadis and water-courses, that bear scatters of dates and thorns, and which support miserable villages of tents or huts. The fierce and wandering tribes, Berber, Arab, and Arabo-African—an especially ‘crooked and perverse generation,’—are equally dangerous to the land traveller and to the shipwrecked mariner.

As sterile and unlovely for the same cause—the absence of tropical rains—are the southern regions of the great Nineteenth Century Island. Good harbours are even rarer than in the north, and the seas about the Cape of Hope, sweeping up unbroken from the South Pole, are yet more perilous. The highlands fringing the southern and eastern coasts arrest the humid winds, and are capable of supporting an extensive population; but the interior and the western coast, being lowlands, are wild and barren. The South African or Kafir family, which has overrun this soil, is still for the most part in the nomade state, and its ‘evident destiny’ is to disappear before the European colonist.

The central and equatorial land, 34° deep, including and bordering upon the zone of almost constant rain, is distinguished by the oppressive exuberance of its vegetation and by the consequent insalubrity of its climate. The drainage of the interior, pouring with discoloured efflux to the ocean, in large and often navigable channels, subject to violent freshes, taints the water-lines with deadly malaria. The false coasts of coralline or of alluvial deposits—a modern formation, and still forming—fringed with green-capped islets, and broken by sandy bays and by projecting capes, are exposed to swells and rollers, to surf and surge, to numbing torrents and chilling tornadoes, whilst muddy backwaters and stagnant islets disclose lagoon-valves or vistas through tangled morass, jungle, and hardly penetrable mangrove-swamp. This maremma, the home of fever, is also the seat of trade, but the tribes which occupy it soon die out.

The true coast has already risen high enough above the waters to maintain its level; and the vegetation—calabashes, palms, and tamarinds—offers a contrast to the swampy growth below. Inland of the raised seaboard are high and jungly mountains and coast-range or ghaut, in many parts yet unvisited by Europeans. Beyond these sierras begins the basin-shaped plateau of Central Equatorial Africa. The inhabitants are mostly inland tribes, ever gravitating towards the coast. They occupy stockaded and barricaded clumps of pent-houses or circular tents, smothered by thicket and veiled, especially after the heavy annual rains, with the ‘smokes,’ a dense white vapour, moisture made visible by the earth being cooler than the saturated air.[^[26]]

I have elsewhere remarked (The Lake Regions of Central Intertropical Africa; Abeokuta and the Camaroons Mountains, &c.) the striking geological contrast between the two equatorial coasts, eastern and western. The former, south of the Guardafui granites, offers to one proceeding inland from the ocean a succession of corallines, of sandstone and of calcaires, which appear to be an offset from the section of that great zone forming the Somali country. The western coasts, after quitting the basalts and lavas of the Camaroons, are composed chiefly of the granites and syenites with their degradations of schiste, gneiss, and sandstone. Similarly, in the great Austro-American continent, one shore, that of the Brazil, is granitic, whilst the other, Chili, mainly consists of the various porphyries.

The negroes and negroids of both these inhospitable coasts, an undeveloped and not to be developed race—in this point agreeing with the fauna and flora around them—are the chief obstacles to exploration, and remarkably resemble each other. The productions of the east and west are similar. The voracious shark swims the seas, turtles bask upon the strands and islets, and the crocodile and hippopotamus haunt the rivers. The forests abound in apes and monkeys, and the open plains support the giraffe, the antelope, and the zebra, hog and wild kine (Bos Caffir and B. Brachyceros), herds of elephants and scatters of rhinoceros. The villagers breed goats and poultry. In the healthier regions they have black cattle and sheep, whilst one tribe has acclimatized the ass. The exceeding fertility of the rain-drenched plains gives an amazing luxuriance to cassava and rice, maize, and holcus, cotton, sugar-cane, and wild indigo, banana, lime and orange, ground-nuts and coffee. The hills and torrent-beds yield gold and copper, antimony, and abundance of iron. On both sides of the continent there are rich deposits of the semi-mineral copal. Coal was found by the Portuguese at Tête and in the Zambeze Valley, as related in Dr Livingstone’s First Expedition (Missionary Travels, &c., xxxi. 633-4). His second prolonged the coal-field to beyond the Valley of the Rufuma (Rovuma) river (xxi. 440), and it will probably be found to extend still further.

Dr Krapf declares (Travels, &c., p. 465) that he discovered coal, ‘the use of which is still unknown to the Abessinians,’ on the banks of the Kuang, a river said to rise in the Dembea Province, near Lake Tsana (Coloë Palus). Finally, to judge from the analogy of the South American continent, the valuable mineral will yet be struck near the western coast, south of the equator.

From time immemorial, on both sides of Africa, the continental Islands, like Aradus and Sidon, Tyre and Alexandria, have been favourite places with stranger settlers. They have proved equally useful as forts, impregnable to the wild aborigines, and as depôts for exports and imports. Second to none in importance is Zanzibar, and the future promises it a still higher destiny.

And first, of the name, which does not occur in Strabo, Pliny, or the Periplus. The log-book attributed to Arrian, of Nicomedia, calls the whole shore, ‘Continent of Azania;’ probably an adaptation, like Azan, and even Ajan, of the Arabic, Barr el Khazáin, or the Land of Tanks,[^[27]] the coast between Ra’as Hafun and Ra’as el Khayl. So Pliny (vi. 28 and 34) speaks of the ‘Azanian Sea’ as communicating with the ‘Arabian Gulf.’ Ptolemy, however (I. 17, sec. iv. 7), has the following important passage: ‘immediately following this mart (Opone) is another bay, where Azania begins. At its beginning are the promontory Zingis (ζίγγις, Zingina promontorium), and the tree-topped Mount Phalangis.’ The name may have extended from the promontory to the coast, and from the coast to the island. Dr Krapf speaks of a tribe of the ‘Zendj’ near the Rufiji river, but I could not hear of it. It is easy to show that the Pelusian geographer’s Opone is the bay south of Ra’as, or Jurd Hafun. Like Pomponius Mela, Ptolemy evidently made his great point de départ the Aromata Promontorium et emporium in Barbarico sinu (Cape Guardafui), and he placed it N. lat. 6° 0′ 0″, instead of N. lat. 11° 50′. This error threw the whole coast 6° (in round numbers, more exactly 5° 50′) too far south, and made the world doubt the accurate position of the Nile lakes. Thus, to his latitude of Opone N. 4° add 5° 50′, and we have N. lat. 9° 50′, the true parallel of Hafun being N. lat. 10° 26′.

Amongst late authors we find the word Zanzibar creeping into use. The Adulis inscription (4th century) gives ‘Zingabene’; and its copier, the Greek monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who proved the globe flat (6th century), calls the ‘unnavigable’ ocean beyond Berberia, the ‘Sea of Zenj,’ and the lands which it bathes ‘Zingium.’ It is found in Abu Zayd Hasan, generally known as Hunayn bin Ishak (died A.D. 873); in El Mas’udi, who describes it at some length (died A.D. 957); in El Bayruni (11th century), and in the learned ‘Nubian Geographer,’ the Sherif El Idrisi (A.D. 1153). Marco Polo (A.D. 1290), who evidently wrote his 37th chapter from hearsay, makes Zanzibar a land of blacks; and, confounding insula with peninsula (in Arabic both being Jezireh), supplies it with a circumference of 2000 miles, and vast numbers of elephants. The India Minor, India Major, and India Tertia of the mediæval Latin travellers are the Sind, Hind, and Zinj of the Arabs. Ibn Batuta (A.D. 1330, 1331), the first Arab traveller who wrote a realistic description of his voyage, has accurately placed Kilwa, which he calls ‘Kulua,’ in the ‘land of the Zunúj.’ Finally, we meet with it in El Nowayri, and in Abulfeda, the ‘Prince of Arab Geographers,’ who both died in the same year, A.D. 1331.

The word Zanj (زنج), corrupted to Zinj, whence the plural ‘Zunúj,’ is evidently the Persian Zang or Zangi (زنگ), a black, altered by the Arabs, who ignore the hard Aryan ‘Gaf’ (گ), the ‘G’ in our gulf. In the same tongue bár means land or region—not sea or sea-coast—and the compounded term would signify Nigritia or Blackland. In modern Persian Zangi still means a negro, and D’Herbelot says of the ‘Zenghis’ that ‘they are properly those called Zingari,[^[28]] and, by some, Egyptians and Bohemians.’ Scholars have not yet shown why the Arab, so rich in nomenclature, borrowed the purely Persian word from his complement the ‘Ajam.’ They have forgotten that the Persians, who of late years have been credited with the unconquerable aversion to the sea which belongs to the Gallas and the Kafirs, were once a maritime people. ‘The indifference or rather the aversion of Persians to navigation’ (M. Guillain, i. 34, 35) must not be charged to the ancient ‘Furs.’ Between A.D. 531–579, when Sayf bin Dhu Yezin, one of the latest Himyarite rulers, wanted aid against the Christian Abyssinians, who had held southern Arabia for 72 years, he applied to Khusrau I., better known as Anushirawán, the 23rd king of the Sassanian dynasty, which began with Ardashir Babegan (A.D. 226), and which ended with Yezdegird III. (A.D. 641), thus lasting 415 years. The ‘Just Monarch’ sent his fleet to the Roman Port’[Roman Port’] (Aden), and slew Masruk. In his day the Persians engrossed, by means of Hira, Obollah, and Sohar, the rich tracts of Yemen and Hindostan; while Basrah (Bassorah) was founded by the Caliph Omar, in order to divert the stream of wealth from the Red Sea, a diversion which will probably soon be repeated. In A.D. 758 the Persians, together with the Arabs, mastered, pillaged, and burn Canton. Much later (17th century) Shah Abbas claimed Zanzibar Island and coast as an appanage of the suzerainty of Oman.

East Africa still preserves traditions of two distinct colonizations from Persia. The first is that of the ‘Emozaydiys,’ or ‘Emozeides’ (Amm Zayd), who conquered and colonized the sea-board of East Africa, from Berberah of the Somal to Comoro and Madagascar, both included. A second and later emigration (about A.D. 1000) occupied the south Zanzibarian coast, and ruins built by the Shirazían[Shirazían] dynasty which still lingers, are shown on various parts of the sea-board. Of these Persian occupations more will be found in the following pages. (Part 1, Chap. I, and Part 2, Chap. 2.)

Persia has left nothing of her widely extended African conquests but a name. In modern days she has become more and more a non-maritime power. She has wholly retired from the coast; and Time, who in these lands works with a will, presently obliterated almost every trace of the stranger. A few ruins at Aden and Berberah, and the white and black sheep of Ormania (Galla-land) and of Somali land, are almost the only vestiges of Persian presence north of the Equator. On the Zangian mainland wells sunk in the rock, monuments of a form now obsolete; mosques with elaborate minarets and pillars of well-cut coralline; fortified positions, loopholed enclosures, and ruined cities whose names have almost been forgotten, are the results of the civilization which they brought with them southwards.

The limits assigned by the Arab geographers to the ‘Land of the Zinj’ are elastic. While some, as Yakut, make it extend from the mouths of the Jub River (S. lat. 0° 14 30″) to Cape Corrientes (S. lat. 24° 7′ 5″) and thus include Sofala; others, with El Idrisi, separate from it the latter district, and unjustly make its southern limit the Rufiji River (S. lat. 7° 38′), thus excluding Kilwa. It should evidently extend to Mozambique Island (S. lat. 15° 2′ 2″), where the Wasawahíli meet the ‘Kafir’ races. The length would thus be, in round numbers, 15° = 900 geographical miles, whilst the breadth, which is everywhere insignificant, can hardly be estimated.

The Arabs, who love to mingle etymology with legend and fable, derive the word ‘Zanzibar’ from the exclamation of its pleased explorers, ‘Zayn za’l barr!’ (fair is this land!). Similar stories concerning Brazilian Olinda and Argentine Buenos Aíres are well known. ‘El Sawáhil,’ the shores, evidently the plural of Sáhil, is still applied to the 600 miles of maritime region whose geographical limits are the Jub River and Cape Delgado (S. lat. 10° 41′ 2”[2”]), and whose ethnographic boundaries are the Somal and the ‘Kafir’ tribes. Others derive it from El Suhayl, the beautiful Canopus which, surrounded by a halo of Arab myth, ever attracts the eye of the southing mariner. The Wasawahíli,’[^[29]] or slave tribes, are fancifully explained by ‘Sawwá hílah,’ he ‘played tricks,’—rascals all.

The coast races who, like their neighbours the Somal, have their own African names for places, call Zanzibar Island by the generic term Kisíwa—insula. It is thus opposed to Mpoa-ni, the coast, and to Mrímá, the mainland.[^[30]] The latter, however, is properly speaking limited to the maritime uplands between Tanga and the Pangani river. Zanzibar city is Unguja (pronounced Ungudya, not Anggouya). The word appears in an ancient settlement on the eastern coast of the island, and the place is still called Unguja Mku, Old Unguja. Some still call it Lunguja, apparently an older form. We find ‘Lendgouya’ in the Commercial Traveller Yakut (early thirteenth century); but ‘Bandgouia’ (Abd el Rashid bin Salih el Bakui, A.D. 1403) is clearly a corruption.

Finally, Zanzibar has been identified by palæogeographers with the Ptolemean Μενουθιὰς or Μενουθεσίας (iv. 9), and with the Μενουθιὰς of the Periplus (Geog. Græci Minores of R. Muller, Paris, 1855), in some copies of which Menouthesías also occurs. Its rivals, however, for this honour are Pemba, Mafiyah (the Monfia of our maps) and Bukini, the northern and north-western parts of Malagash or Madagascar.[^[31]] Ptolemy, it may be observed, places the two important sites, Menouthias and Prasum (or Prassum) in a separate chapter (iv. 9), whereas his principal list of stations is in Book iv. chapter 7. He lays down the site of Menouthias in S. lat. 12°, and nearly opposite the Lunar Mountain, and the Lakes whence the Nile arises (S. lat. 12° 30′). The mouth of the Rhapta river and Rhapta, the metropolis of Barbaria, are in S. lat. 7°, the Rhapta promontory is in S. lat. 8° 20′ 5″, and the Prasum promontory in S. lat. 15°. By applying the correction as before, we have for Menouthias S. lat. 6° (the capital of Zanzibar being in S. lat. 6° 9′ 6″); for the Lakes, 6° 30′, which would nearly bisect Tanganyika; for Rhapta river and city, S. lat. 1° (or more exactly, S. lat. 1° 10′); the mouth of the Jub river being in S. lat. 0° 14′ 30″; the Rhapta promontory in S. lat. 2° 30′, corresponding with the coast about Patta; and finally, for Prasum S. lat. 9° 10′—Cape Delgado being in S. lat. 10° 41′ 12″.

The account given of Menouthias in the Periplus (written between A.D. 64, Vincent, and A.D. 210, Letronne[^[32]]) is that of an eyewitness: ‘After two nychthemeral days (each of 100 miles) towards the west [here the text is evidently corrupt] comes Menouthias, altogether insulated, distant from the land about 300 stadia (30 geographical miles), low and tree-clad. In it are many kinds of birds and mountain tortoises (land turtle?). It has no other wild beasts but crocodiles (iguanas), and these do not injure man. There are in it sewn boats and monoxyles (canoes), which they use for salt-pans [here the text is defective] and for catching turtle. In this island they trap them after a peculiar fashion with baskets (the modern wigo) instead of nets, letting them down at the mouth of stony inlets’ (chap. i. 15).

The next chapter informs us: ‘From which (island) after two runs (each 50 miles)[^[33]] lies the last emporium of the continent of Azania, called Tà Rhaptà, thus named from the before-mentioned sewn-together vessels. In it are much ivory and tortoise-shell. The men, who in this country are of the largest size, live scattered (in the mountains?), and each tribe in its own place is subject to tyrants’ (‘tyranneaulx’ or petty chiefs).

Here, then, we have Rhapta 33 leagues (100 miles = 1° 40′) beyond Menouthias. Captain Guillain (Prem. Partie, p. 115) would make the former correspond with the debouchure of the Oufidji river (Rufiji or Lufiji), in S. lat. 7° 50′. But the Periplus, unlike Ptolemy, alludes only to a port, not to a river mouth, nor does the coast-line here show any promontory. Others have proposed Point Puna (S. lat. 7° 2′ 42″), the south-western portal of the Zanzibar manche, near the modern trading port of Mbuamáji, which in former ages may have been more important. D’Anville, Vincent, and De Froberville boldly prefer Kilwa (in round numbers S. lat. 9°), which is distant 157 geographical miles from the southernmost point of Zanzibar, and I think they are right. It is safer in such matters to suspect an error of figures and of distances than of topography, especially where the geographical features are so well marked and cannot be found in other places. Computations of ancient courses and log-books can have little value except when they serve to confirm commonly topographical positions. Kilwa has ever been a central station on the Zanzibar coast, and the slaves brought from the interior are still remarkable for size. Moreover, as Dr Beke well observes (Sources of the Nile, p. 69), ‘In attempting to fix in the map of Africa the true position of Ptolemy’s lakes and sources of the Nile, we must discard all notions of their having been determined absolutely by means of astronomical observations, special maps of particular localities, or otherwise, and regard them simply as derived from oral information, and as laid down relatively to some well-known point or points on the coast.’[^[34]]

Zanzibar, the principal link in the chain of islets which extends from Makdishu (Magadoxo), in the Barr el Benadir or Haven-land, to Cape Corrientes, is a long narrow reef, with the major axis disposed from N. N. W. to S. S. E., and subtending a deep bight or bend in the coast, justly enough called the Barbaric Gulf. The length is 48·25 geographical miles from Ra’as Nunguwi, the northern (S. lat. 5° 42′ 8″ Raper), to Ra’as Kizimkaz, the southern, extremity (S. lat. 6° 27′ 7″ Raper). The breadth is 18 miles from the Fort in E. long. 39° 14′ 5″ Raper’s correction, to the continental coast in E. long. (G.) 39° 32′ 5″. French travellers assume a max. length of 83 kilomètres, and a max. breadth of 33. The capital (S. lat. 6° 9′ 6″) corresponds in parallel with the Pernambucan province to the west and with Java and central New Guinea to the east. The corrected longitude (laid down by Captain Smee in 1811 as E. lat. 39° 15′) gives a difference of Greenwich time 2^h. 36^m. and 56^s.. From Southampton round the Cape the run is usually laid down at 8500 miles, viâ Suez 6200. The Lesseps Canal has shortened the distance from Marseille by 2000 leagues, and thus has placed Zanzibar within 1600 leagues of the great port—in fact, about the distance of the Gaboon ex-colony.

The formation of the island is madrepore, resting upon a core or base of stratified sand-stone grit, disposed in beds varying from 1·5 to 3 feet thick. The surface gently inclines towards the sea, and the lines of fracture run parallel with the shores. Three distinct formations occur to one crossing the breadth.[^[35]] The first is a band of grit-based coralline, which runs meridionally, and is most remarkable on the eastern side. This portion, featureless and thinly inhabited, is protected from the dangerous swell and the fury of the Indian Ocean by a broad reef and scattered rocks of polypidoms. The band thins out to the north and south: in the centre, where it is widest, the breadth may be three to four miles, and the greatest height 400 feet. The coral-rag is mostly white and of many shapes, like fans, plants, and trees: the most usual form is the mushroom, with a broad domed head rising from a narrow stem. The texture is exceedingly reticulated and elastic; solid masses, however, occur where neighbouring rocks meet and bind—hence the labyrinth of caverns, raised by secular upgrowth and preserving the original formation. The ground echoes, as in volcanic countries, hollow and vault-like to the tread; the tunnels are frequently without issue for drainage, and when the rain drips in, the usual calcareous phenomena, stalactites and stalagmites, appear. Many of these caves are found on the coast as well as on the island. The carbonate of lime is very pure, and contains brown or yellow-white crystals.

A stony valley, sunk below the level of both flanks, is said to bisect the island from north to south. Into this basin fall sundry small streams, the Mohayra and others, which are lost through the crevices and caverns, and in the cracks and fissures of the grit. There are other drains, forming, after heavy downfalls, swamps and marshes, whence partly the great insalubrity of the interior. The western part of Zanzibar, with its wealth of evergreen vegetation, appears by far the most fertile. It is a meridional band of red clay and sandy hills, running parallel with the corallines of the eastern coast. Here are the most elevated grounds. I found the royal plantation Sebbé or Izimbane, 400 feet (B.P.) above sea-level, or a little higher than the Bermudas. The least productive parts are those covered with dark clay. Heavy rains deposit arenaceous matter upon the surface, and the black humus disappears. On this side of the island also many streamlets discharge into the sea, bearing at their mouths mangrove beds, whose miasmas cause agues, dysenteries, diarrhœas, and deadly fevers.

The rule established by Dampier and quoted by Humboldt directs us to expect great depth near a coast formed by high perpendicular mountains. Here, as in the rest of the Zanzibarian archipelago, the maritime line, unlike the west Atlantic islands Tenerife and Madeira, is composed of gently rolling hills. Yet seven fathoms are often found within a stone-throw of the land, whilst the encircling ledges are steep-to, marked in the charts 1/100 and 1/140. Evidently, then, the corallines are perched upon the summits of a submarine range which rises sharp and abrupt from abysmal hollows and depressions. As usual too in such formations, the leeward shore line of the island, where occur the lagoon entrances, is more varied and accidented than the eastern. At Pemba this feature will be even more remarkable.

The windward coast, in common with many parts of the continental seaboard, suffers especially from June to August from the Ras de Marée (Manuel de la Navigation et la Côte occidentale de l’Afrique), a tide race, supposed to result from the meeting of currents. It is a line of rollers neither far from nor very near the shore. The hurling and sagging surf is described to resemble the surge of a submarine earthquake; and the strongest craft, once entangled in the send, cannot escape. It would be useful to note, as at West African Lagos, the greater or less atmospheric pressure accompanying the phenomenon, and to seek a connection between it and the paroxysms of the neighbouring cyclone region. At all times sailors remark the ‘shortness’ of the waves and the scanty intervals between their succession. This peculiarity cannot be explained in the usual way by shoals and shallow water causing a ground-swell.

With respect to the great East African ocean-current, which has given rise to so many fables gravely recorded by the Arab geographers,[^[36]] the best authorities at Zanzibar are convinced, and their log-books prove, that both its set and drift, like the Brazilian coast-stream, are in the present state of our knowledge subject to the extremes of variation. The charts and Horsburgh lay it down as a regular S.W. current; and so it is in the southern, whilst in the northern part it is hardly perceptible. Between Capes Guardafui and Delgado it flows now up then down the coast; here it trends inland, there it sets out to sea. Dr Ruschenberger relates that on Sept. 1, 1835, his ship, when south of Zanzibar, was carried 50 miles in 15 hours, and was obliged to double the northern cape. The same happened to Captain Guillain in August 1846, when he lost five days. This resulted from the superior force of the S.W. monsoon, which often drives vessels to the north 30 to 40 miles during the day and night. Lieut. Christopher (Journal, Jan. 5, 1843) reported it to be variable and violent, especially close in shore, and observed that it frequently trends against the wind. It is usually made to run to the S.W. between December and April, at the rate of 1·3 miles per hour, from Ra’as Hafun to Ra’as Aswad, and two to three miles per hour between Capes Aswad and Delgado. Shipmasters at Zanzibar have assured me that when this coastal current covers three knots an hour there is a strong backwater or counter-flow, which, like the Gulf-stream, trends to the north, and against which, with light winds, native vessels cannot make way. This counter-current has extensive limits; usually it is considered strongest between Mafiyah and Pomba. The ship St Abbs, concerning which so much has been said and written of late years, was wrecked in 1855 off St Juan de Nova of the Comoro group (S. lat. 17° 3′ 5″), and pieces of it were swept up to Brava (N. lat. 1° 6′ 8″), upwards of 1000 miles. The crew is supposed still to be in captivity amongst the Abghal tribe; and in 1865 an Arab merchant brought to Zanzibar a hide marked with letters which resembled N F B N. A writer in the Pall Mall opined the letters to be ‘Wasm’ or tribal brands, justly observing that ‘all the Bedawin have these distinguishing marks,’ but forgetting that he was speaking of the analphabetic Somal, to whom such knowledge does not extend. As we might expect, the Mozambique stream, south of Cape Delgado, always flows southerly with more or less westing. The rate is said to vary from 20 to 80 miles a day.

Our hydrographical charts are correct enough to guide safely into and out of port any shipmaster who will sound, and can take an angle. As, however, the navigation is easy, so accidents are common. Any land-lubber could steer a ship from Bombay to Karachi (Kurrachee), and yet how many have been lost! Often, too, it is in seamanship as in horsemanship, when the best receive the most and the heaviest falls. In May 1857 the Jonas, belonging to Messrs Vidal, was sunk by mistaking Chumbi Island for its neighbour Bawi. Three or four days afterwards the Storm King of Salem, Messrs Bertram, ran aground whilst hugging Chumbi in order to distance a rival. The number of reefs and shoals render it always unadvisable to enter the port at night, and in the heaviest weather safe riding-ground is found between Zanzibar Island and the continent.

ZANZIBAR FROM THE SEA.

Vessels from the south making Zanzibar in the N.E. monsoon, the trade-wind of December to March, leave Europa Island to the west, and the Comoro group and S. Juan de Nova on the east. Keeping well in mid-channel, they head straight for Mafiyah. They hug Point Puna, avoiding Latham’s Bank,[^[37]] and they work up by Kwale and the Chumbi Island. Ships from the north have only to run down the mid-channel, between Pemba and the continent, and then to pass west of Tumbatu. Those sailing southward from Zanzibar at this season pass along-shore, down the Mozambique Channel. Vessels from the south making Zanzibar in May to September, the height of the S.W. monsoon—the anti-N.E. trade—sail up the same passage. They must beware of falling to leeward; and those that neglect ‘lead and look-out’ are ever liable to be carried northwards to Pemba by the counter-current before mentioned, which may, however, now be a wind-current. At this season ship-masters missing the mark have sometimes made 3° to 4° of easting, and have preferred beating down to Mafiyah and running up again, rather than face the ridicule of appearing viâ the northern passage. Those leaving the Island in the S.W. monsoon stand north up channel, well out in E. lon. 9° 42′ to 43′, beat south of Cape Delgado, pass between the Comoro group and the mainland, and thus catch the Mozambique gulfstream. The brises solaires blow strongest off Madagascar in June and July. They fall light in August and September.

The aspect of Zanzibar from the sea is that of coralline islands generally—a graceful, wavy outline of softly rounded ground, and a surface of ochre-coloured soil, thickly clothed with foliage alternating between the liveliest leek-green and the sombrest laurel, the only variety that vegetation knows in this land of eternal verdure. Everywhere the scenery is similar; each mile of it is a copy of its neighbour; and the want of variety, of irregularity, of excitement, so to speak, soon makes itself felt. Zanzibar ignores the exhilaration of pure desert air, and the exaltation produced by the stern aspect of mountain regions or by a boundless expanse of Pampa and Sahara. Without a single element of sublimity, soft and smiling, its sensuous and sequestered scenery has no power to spur the thought, to breed an idea within the brain. The oppressive luxuriance of its growth combined with the excess of damp heat, and possibly the abnormal proportion of ozone, are the most unfavourable conditions for the masculine. The same is the case in Mazanderan, Malabar, Egypt, Phœnicia, California, and other Phre-kah—lands of the sun. And the aspect of that everlasting, beginning-less, endless verdure tends, as on the sea-board of the Brazil, to produce sensations of melancholy and depression. We learn at last to loathe thee,