‘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.

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!

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.

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:—

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

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—

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.

‘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—

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.