On coming here I had the misfortune to make my donkey over to Bombay, to save his foot, which had been galled by too constant walking; for though unable to ride, he was too proud to say nay, and was therefore placed upon it, carrying the gun consigned to his charge, Captain Burton's smooth elephant. Now Bombay rode much after the fashion of a sailor, trusting more to balance and good-luck than skill in sticking on; and the consequence was, that with the first side-step the donkey made he came to the ground an awkward cropper, falling heavily on the small of the stock of the gun, which snapped short off, the piece being thus irredeemably damaged. At first I rated him heartily, for this was the second of Captain Burton's guns which had been damaged in my hands. I then told Bombay of the circumstances which led to the accident to the first gun. It occurred whilst hippopotamus-shooting on the coast rivers opposite to Zanzibar; and as Bombay had a little experience in that way to relate, we had long yarns about such sport, which served to improve our Hindustani (the language I always conversed with him in), as well as to divert our useless yet unavoidable feelings of regret at the accident, and also killed time.
One day, when on the Tanga river near its mouth, I was busily engaged teasing hippopotami, with one man, a polesman, in a very small canoe, just capable of carrying what it had on board, myself in the bows, with my 4-bore Blissett in hand, while Captain Burton's monster elephant-gun, a double-barrelled 6-bore, weighing, I believe, 20 lb., was lying at the stern in the poler's charge.
The river was a tidal one, of no great breadth, and the margin was covered by a thick growth of the mangrove shrub, on the boughs of which the sharp-edged shells of the tree-oyster stuck in strings and clusters in great numbers. The best time to catch the hippopotamus is when the tide is out and the banks are bared, for then you find him wallowing in the mud or basking on the sand (when there is any), like jungle-hog, and with a well-directed shot on the ear, or anywhere about the brain-pan, you have a good chance of securing him. I especially mention this, as it is quite labour in vain, in places where the water is deep, to fire at these animals, unless you can kill them outright, as they dive under like a water-rat, and are never seen more if they are only wounded. I, like most raw hands at this particular kind of sport, began in a very different way from what, I think, a more experienced hunter would have done, by chasing them in the water, and firing at their heads whenever they appeared above it; and even fired slugs about their eyes and ears, in hopes that I might irritate them sufficiently to make them charge the canoe. This teasing proved pretty successful; for when the tide had run clean out, only pools and reaches, connecting by shallow runnels the volume of the natural stream, remained for the hippopotami to sport about in; and my manoeuvring in these confined places became so irritating, that a large female came rapidly under water to the stern of the canoe, and gave it such a sudden and violent cant with her head or withers, that that end of the vessel shot up in the air, and sent me sprawling on my back, with my legs forced up by the seat—a bar of wood—at right angles to my body; whilst the poler and the big double gun were driven like a pair of shuttlecocks, flying right and left of the canoe high up into the air.
The gun on one side fell plump into the middle of the stream, and the man on the other dropped, post first, on to the hippopotamus's back, but rapidly scrambled back into the canoe. The hippopotamus then, as is these animals' wont, renewed the attack, but I was ready to receive her, and as she came rolling porpoise-fashion close by the side of the canoe, I fired a quarter of a pound of lead, backed by four drams of powder, into the middle of her back, the muzzle of the rifle almost touching it. She then sank, and I never saw her more; but the gun (after lying on the sandy bottom the whole of that night), I managed, by the aid of several divers, to find on the following day.
Bombay says that on one occasion, when coming down the Pangani river in a canoe with several other men, an irritated hippopotamus charged and upset it, upon which he and all his friends dived under water and then swam to the shore, leaving the hippopotamus to vent his rage on the shell of the canoe, which he most spitefully stuck to. This, he assures me, is the proper way to dodge a hippopotamus, and escape the danger of a bite from him. On another occasion, when I was hippopotamus-hunting in one of the boats of the Artemise, in an inlet of the sea close to Kaolé, I chased a herd of hippopotami in deep water, till one of the lot, coming as usual from below, drove a tusk clean through the boat with such force that he partially hoisted her out of the water; but the brute did no further damage, for I kept him off by making the men splash their oars rapidly whilst making for the shore, where we just arrived in time to save ourselves from sinking.
The day previous to this adventure, I bagged a fine young male hippopotamus close to this spot, by hitting him on the ear when standing in shallow water. The ivory of these animals is more prized than that of the elephant, and, in consequence of the superior hardness of its enamel, it is in great requisition with the dentist.
Hippopotami are found all down this coast in very great numbers, but especially in the deltas of the rivers, or up the streams themselves, and afford an easy, remunerative, and pleasant sport to any man who is not addicted to much hard exercise. The Panjani, Kingani, and Lufiji rivers are full of them, as well as all the other minor feeders to the sea along that coast. If these animals happen to be killed in places so far distant from the sea that the tidal waters have not power to draw them out to the ocean depths, their bodies will be found, when inflated with gas, after decomposition, floating on the surface of the water a day or two afterwards, and can easily be secured by the sportsman, if he be vigilant enough to take them before the hungry watchful savages come and secure them, to appease their rapacious appetites. Mussulmans will even eat these amphibious creatures without cutting their throats, looking on them as cold-blooded animals, created in the same manner as fish.
The following day, 10th August, we made a halt to try our fortune again in purchasing cows, but failed as usual; so the following morning we decamped at dawn, and marched thirteen miles to our original station in Southern Néra. Here I purchased four goats for one dhoti merikani, the best bargain I ever made. Thunder had rumbled, and clouds overcast the skies for two days; and this day a delicious cooling shower fell. The people said it was the little rains—chota barsât, as we call it in India—expected yearly at this time, as the precursor of the later great falls.
As Seedi Bombay was very inquisitive to-day about the origin of Seedis, his caste, and as he wished to know by what law of nature I accounted for their cruel destiny in being the slaves of all men, I related the history of Noah, and the dispersion of his sons on the face of the globe; and showed him that he was of the black or Hametic stock, and by the common order of nature, they, being the weakest, had to succumb to their superiors, the Japhetic and Semitic branches of the family; and, moreover, they were likely to remain so subject until such time as the state of man, soaring far above the beast, would be imbued by a better sense of sympathy and good feeling, and would then leave all such ungenerous appliances of superior force to the brute. Bombay, on being made a Mussulman by his Arab master, had received a very different explanation of the degradation of his race, and narrated his story as follows:—"The Arabs say that Mahomet, whilst on the road from Medina to Mecca, one day happened to see a widow woman sitting before her house, and asked her how she and her three sons were; upon which the troubled woman (for she had concealed one of her sons on seeing Mahomet's approach, lest he, as is customary when there are three males of a family present, should seize one and make him do porterage), said, 'Very well; but I've only two sons.' Mahomet, hearing this, said to the woman, reprovingly, 'Woman, thou liest; thou hast three sons and for trying to conceal this matter from me, henceforth remember that this is my decree—that the two boys which thou hast not concealed shall multiply and prosper, have fair faces, become wealthy, and reign lords over all the earth; but the progeny of your third son shall, in consequence of your having concealed him, produce Seedis as black as darkness, who will be sold in the market like cattle, and remain in perpetual servitude to the descendants of the other two."
12th.—We returned to our former quarters, the village of Salawé; but I did not enjoy such repose as on the former visit, for the people were in their cups, and, nolens volens, persisted in entering my hut. Sometimes I rose and drove them out, at other times I turned round and feigned to sleep; but these manoeuvres were of no avail; still they poured in, and one old man, more impudent than the rest, understanding the trick, seized my pillow by the end, and, tugging at it as a dog pulls at a quarter of horse, roused me with loud impatient "Whu-hu" and "Hi, hi's," until at last, out of patience, I sent my boots whirling at his head. This cleared the room, but only for a moment: the boisterous, impudent crowd, true to savage nature, enjoying the annoyance they had occasioned, returned exultingly, with shouts and grins, in double numbers.