PREPARATIONS FOR DEPARTURE 469
APPENDIX.
THE UKARA OR UKEREWE LAKE 490
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.
[Illustration:
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.
-----
Footnote 1:
Mr Frere’s memory is unusually short. I intrusted the MS. to the
Eurasian apothecary of the Zanzibar Consulate, and I suspected (Lake
Regions of Central Africa, vol. i. chap. i.) that it had come to an
untimely end. The white population at Zanzibar had in those days a
great horror of publication, and thus is easily explained how a parcel
legibly addressed to the Royal Geographical Society had the honour of
passing eight years in the strong box of the ‘Bombay Branch of the
Royal Asiatic Society.’
Footnote 2:
Georg. lib. i. ix. The concluding words are ὧν ἐστι τὸ τῶν Ῥαπτῶν
ἀκροτήριον ὀλιγῴ νοτιώτερον. There is no reason why Bilibaldus
Pirkimerus (Bilibaldi Pirckeymher), Lugd. 1535, should render it,
‘quibus _Rhaptum promontorium_ paululum est Australius.’
Footnote 3:
When the Portuguese counselled the Abyssinians to wall their
settlements against the Gallas, the former replied like Spartans, ‘No;
we keep stones to build churches and temples, but we defend our
country with our arms and hands!’ The Coptic ‘Nob’ signifies gold
(Ritter Erdkunde, French translation, 142), the Camoensian ‘Noba’ is
therefore more correct than our modern Nubia, which we find in the
monk Burchard (A.D. 1250), ‘Æthiopia quæ hodie Nubia dicitur.’ De
Barros (1. iii. xii.) prefers ‘a gente dos Nobis.’ I have been tempted
to add a stanza which is _not_ translated from Camoens.
95 (_a_)
‘And see the twain from Albion’s chalky shore
go forth th’ Egyptian mystic veil to rend:
the farthest font of Nilus they explore,
those mighty waters whence the rivers trend,
then, O dire Chance! O Fortune hard and sore!
of all their fatal labours view the end—
that lies self-victimed in his natal land,
this lives afar on friendless foreign strand.’
Footnote 4:
The losses of the Somali expedition (not including those of the Arab
and Somali attendants) were as follows:—
Lt. Stroyan, I.N. (killed), lost Co.’s Rupees 1750
Lt. Speke (wounded) do. 4100
Lt. Burton (do.) do. 1950
Lt. Herne do. 500
Shaykh Ahmed do. 120
——
Total, Company’s Rupees 8420
Footnote 5:
I could not resist the temptation of printing ‘wig’ and newspaper
paragraph side by side in the Appendix (ii. 428) to my ‘Lake Regions
of Central Africa.’
Footnote 6:
Proceedings Royal Geographical Society, May 5, 1866. The lamented
travellers’ notes have now (1869-70) being published under the title
of ‘Baron Carl Claus von der Decken’s Reisen in Ost-Afrika in den
Jahren 1859 bis 1861. Bearbeitet von Otto Kersten (who accompanied the
first expedition). London. Asher.’
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.
-----
Footnote 7:
Somewhat boisterous, but true. (Note 14 years afterwards.)
Footnote 8:
Literally rock, rocky ground. Hence the Arabs are called Wámánga. Mr
Cooley (‘Inner Africa Laid Open,’ p. 61) blunders pitiably about this
word.
Footnote 9:
This is the ‘Poane’ of ‘O Muata Cazembe’ (p. 323), and there rightly
translated, ‘Costa de Zanzibar.’ Mr Cooley (p. 14, ‘The Memoir on the
Lake Regions, &c., reviewed.’ London, Stanford, 1864) thus misleads
his readers: ‘The Cazembe knew the name of only one place on the
coast—Mpoáni, near the Querimba Islands.’ The word literally means ‘on
the coast,’ or simply ‘the coast.’ In the Zangian dialects the
terminative ‘-ni’ has two senses. Now it is a locative, signifying on,
in, by, or near, as, e.g., Nyumba-ni, ‘at home’ (in the house);
Mfu’ua-ni, at the place near the Mfu’u tree. Then it is almost
pleonastic, as Kisiwa-ni, ‘the island,’ and Kisima-ni, ‘the well.’
Mpoa-ni, a word in general use, is a literal Kisawahili translation of
the Arabic Sawáhil (plural of Sáhil), ‘the shores,’ strictly speaking
between Mtangata and the Rufiji River. Hence, possibly, the Greeks
drew their name, ‘Αιγιαλος.’ The latter is usually identified with the
modern Arabic Sayf Tawíl, the long strand, not ‘bold or declining
shore,’ as translated by Captain Owen. It extends southwards from the
Ra’as el Khayl to Ra’as Awaz (Cape of Change) in the Barr el Khazáin
(Ajan or Azania). Of the latter more in Sect. 1, Chapter V.
Footnote 10:
De Barros by a slip of the pen writes (Decades i. 5, 9) Guadrafu. I
should explain the corrupted ‘Guardafui’ not as usual by ‘Cabo
d’Orfui,’ but as a European version of Jurd Hafun,—highland or crest
of Hafun. Jurd, in Arabic, means the mountain-top, opposed to the
Wusut, shoulders or half-way slopes, and to the Sahl, or low lands.
The modern Arabic name of the ancient Aromata Promontarium is Ra’as
Asir, the captive headland, a term especially applied to the
projection of land, some 2000 feet high, which, viewed from the south,
extends farthest seaward to the north-east, as I saw when sailing from
Zanzibar to Aden. Hafun, supposed to be the Mosyllum Promontorium of
Pliny and the Opone of Ptolemy, the Khakhui of El Idrisi; the Jafuni
of El Masudi; the Carfuna of other Arab geographers, and the Orfui of
the moderns, means the surrounded, i.e. by water, because almost an
island. Lieutenant Crittenden, I.N. (Aden, April 10, 1848.
Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society), describes it as a
headland of lime and sandstone nearly square, and 600 to 700 feet
high. He remarks that after the Elephas Mons it is the only point on
the coast concerning which there can be no mistake. The sites are
thus—
Ras Asir (Guardaful)
North Easternmost point
of Africa N.lat. 11° 50′ 0″ Raper (11° 4′ 4″ Norris)
Ras Hafun, Easternmost
point of Africa N.lat. 10° 26′ 48″ " (10° 27′ 48″ ” )
—— —— —— —— —— ——
Difference 1° 23′ 52″ 1° 13′ 16″
Lieutenant Carless, I.N., makes
the difference of meridian arc 0° 4′ 50″
Footnote 11:
Yet we read of the ‘great river Matoney,’ and of ‘travellers crossing
the great River Mtony.’ Mto, in the language of Zanzibar, is a river
or a rivulet; also a pillow. The Quilimani River signifies simply
kilima-ni, (water) from the mountain. The meaning of Quilimansi (the
Obi—Webbe—Nile of Makdishu, Webbe Shebayli, of late christened the
Haines River, and called Quilimancy by De Barros, from a settlement
now unknown) is still under dispute. It cannot grammatically be made
to mean ‘mountain-stream, or a mountain with streams,’ as Dr Krapf has
it.
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.’[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 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.
-----
Footnote 12:
The ‘Father of History’ evidently held to the theory that the modern
Bahr el Ghazal (explored of late by Mr Petherich and by the
unfortunate Tinné family) was the head reservoir of the White Nile.
Nor is it impossible that in long-past ages the lakes or waters in
question were fed by a watershed whose eastern declivities still
discharge themselves into the higher basin.
Footnote 13:
In 1859 I had written (Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xxix.
272) ‘The Nyanza, as regards name, position, and even existence, has
hitherto been unknown to European geographers; but descriptions of
this “sea” by native travellers have been unconsciously transferred by
our writers to the Tanganyika of Ujiji, and even to the Nyassa of
Kilwa.’ Mr Hogg proposes to show that such was not the case. But the
map by John Senex (1711) throws into one three or at least two waters.
Mercator (Kauffman) lays the ‘Garava’ lakelet almost parallel with the
Zaflan (Zambeze) or Kilwa Lake. Walker (1811) and Lizars (1815) fit in
the Tanganyika correctly, whilst the Nyassa is wholly incorrect.
Of the five maps one only, that of John Senex, deserves consideration.
‘This great lake placed here by report of the negroes,’ alludes, I
believe, to legends of the Bahari-ngo (the ‘great sea,’ vulgarly,
Baringo), of which many East African travellers have heard. One Rumu
wa Kikandi, a native of Uemba, described the water to Dr Krapf as
lying five days’ journey from Mount Kenia: in the Introduction to his
last travels (p. xlviii.), however, the enterprising missionary
identifies it with the so-called Nyanza or Ukerewe Lake. I was told of
it by the Wakamba at Mombasah in 1857. The Père Léon d’Avanchers
(Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, vol. xvii. 164) also collected,
when travelling on the East African coast, in August, 1858,
information concerning Baharingo, as he writes it. Senex finally
disconnects it with the Nile, and indeed gives it no drainage at all.
I cannot but think that Mr Hogg’s learning and research have
considerably strengthened my position, and that the so-called Nyanza
Lake was, curious to say, the least known, and at the same time the
nearest, to European geographers.
Footnote 14:
This ‘restrictive treaty’ was published in No. 24 of the Bombay
Selection (1856), under the head of ‘Persian Gulf.’
Footnote 15:
We must not, however, forget that in ‘all-enlightened England’
Smollett could complain of the ‘people at the other end of the island
knowing as little of Scotland as of Japan.’
Footnote 16:
The ‘Nyassi’ is, in fact, a general reservoir into which are thrown
the Lakes Tanganyika, the Nyassa, the Shirwa, and the four smaller
waters, the Liemba, the Bangweolo, the Moero of the great river
Chambeze, and the Liemba drained by the Lufira-Luapula stream. The
latter, lying between S. lat. 10°-12°, have lately been reported by Dr
Livingstone (Map of the Lake Region of Eastern Africa), showing the
Sources of the Nile recently discovered by Dr Livingstone, with notes,
&c., by Keith Johnston, jun. (Johnston); and we have a Sketch Map of
Dr Livingstone’s recent Explorations—Eine Kartenskizze, &c. From Dr
Petermann’s Geographische Mittheilungen, Part V., for May, 1870
(Gotha, Perthes).
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).