Colonel Goodwin and the Headquarters of the Regiment, with 500 rifles and 300 carriers of the Sierra Leone Carrier Corps, embarked on H.M. transport Hongbee on the 5th January, 1918, and followed the two detachments, under Captain Shaw and Captain Duck, which had preceded them.
The Portuguese Estado d’Africa Oriental, like Gaul in the time of Julius Cæsar, is divided into three parts—Lorenço Marquez, Mozambique, and the territory of the Nyassa Company. The last-named, which is really the northern portion of Mozambique, comprises all the country situated between the Rovuma and the Lurio, or Luli, rivers, and between the eastern borders of British Nyassaland and the sea. It is leased to a chartered company, which appoints its own Governor, subject to the approval of some Portuguese authority, and depends for its revenues upon a poll-tax and a hut-tax. Both of these impositions are for the most part paid in kind, and they are collected by agents or revenue-farmers, who occupy the entrenched forts, locally called bomas, which are dotted about the country at fairly frequent intervals. The smaller fortified posts, similarly occupied by the native agents of the revenue-farmers, are called mborio. The population is comparatively speaking dense, but there is little trade and even less prosperity. It is of the territory exploited by this chartered company that Port Amelia is the capital.
At Port Amelia there is an inlet of the sea, roughly circular in shape, which measures about six miles across at its widest part, and bears the name of Pomba Bay. The entrance to this bay is about a mile broad and on the southern side a cliff, two hundred feet or more in height, juts out, narrowing the mouth of the inlet. It is at the foot of this cliff that the commercial portion of Port Amelia and the native town are situated; and on its summit is the house of the Governor, flanked by the building in which the officers of the Portuguese Government at once live and work, with a rather ramshackle set of police barracks facing it. The landing-place at Port Amelia consists of a short, snub-nosed stone pier, which leads to a sandy beach, beyond which there is a single line of rather mean-looking shops and commercial buildings. These are for the most part constructed of mud, lime-washed or colour-washed, red or blue, fitted with green shutters and roofed with corrugated iron. Near their centre, however, there are two fairly substantial houses built of wood, one of which was subsequently used as a rest-house for British officers passing through Port Amelia. To the left, as you face the town, the native quarter adjoins the commercial buildings—a cluster of squalid mud huts roofed with grass. The total population of the place does not exceed fifteen hundred souls.
From the lower town a steep motor-road climbs the hill till the summit of the cliff is reached, where it passes between the Governor’s house and the police barracks. The former is a two-storeyed building, raised on piles, with stone or concrete verandah pillars, but for the rest constructed entirely of wood. The block of Government offices in which the officials live and work is built of similar materials; but the police barracks are a mud structure colour-washed a dull red. All these buildings, like those in the commercial town at the foot of the cliff, are roofed with corrugated iron.
Judged from the æsthetic standpoint, these tin roofs are always an abomination; but in the tropics they are peculiarly hateful. They are most efficient conductors of heat, and with a vertical sun beating down upon them, they produce in the buildings which they cover an atmosphere resembling that of an oven. Moreover, exposure to the sea air causes rapid corrosion, and they speedily cease to be even water-tight. For the rest, the extensive use of corrugated iron roofing in the tropics always marks, in a European settlement, a very primitive stage of development. It proclaims the phase of makeshifts and of temporary expedients—the period of comfortless picnicking—which must always precede, though it is not always followed by, an era of advancement and prosperity. Where corrugated iron roofing is found predominating in any tropical settlement which has been in European occupation for more than a very few years, the fact may be accepted as a sure indication that local enterprise has so far produced very indifferent results.
From the flat ground on the top of the cliff a grassy slope runs down in a long slope to the waters of the Indian Ocean. Turning one’s back on this and looking out across the bay, a rather pretty view is obtained of hills rising inland behind the little fishing village of Bandari, six miles away. The shores of the bay are stretches of sand varied by patches of black-green mangroves; and seen from the sea, Port Amelia—a line of mean white and colour-washed buildings, surmounted by glaring tin roofs, and flanked by a cluster of native hovels—devoid of vegetation, and sweltering beneath a tropical sun, appears as undesirable a specimen of a European outpost as it would be possible anywhere to light upon.
Major Shaw’s detachment, which had been the first to arrive, had established a camp on the top of the high ridge, which has the sea on one side of it and the waters of the bay upon the other, at a spot distant about a mile from the residence of the Governor.
The motor-road, which ascends to the top of the cliff, runs on, dropping down again to the level of the bay, through masses of very thick, fine grass; and by this route Mtuge, which lies about two miles inland from Bandari, is distant eight and twenty miles from Port Amelia. A quicker means of reaching this place, however, is to sail across the bay to Bandari; but here there is a sloping beach and shoal water which prevent even a rowing-boat being brought close to the shore. The journey to Bandari was usually accomplished by sailing across the bay in dhows, such as have plied in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and upon the waters of the Indian Ocean ever since the days of Hippalus and before. When the wind was favourable this was easy enough, but often, in the sheltered area of the bay, these sailing-boats would be becalmed for days at a time, and they still more often had to be warped out from the shore for several hundreds of yards to a point from whence they could catch enough breeze to set them moving. This operation was affected[affected] by shipping the anchor and placing it on board a gig, which then rowed ahead of the dhow and dropped the anchor overboard. Next all hands and the cook tugged on the anchor-chain, till the dhow had been brought short up to her moorings, when the anchor was once more shipped, retransferred to the gig, and the tedious process was repeated. By this means a couple of hours were sometimes occupied in covering a distance of as many hundred yards.
When the dhow had at last been got under way, and the six miles of sea separating Port Amelia from Bandari had been crossed, all her contents had to be man-handled to the shore for a distance of about two hundred yards. Between Bandari and Mtuge, whence the main road runs inland in a westerly direction, there lies a swamp which rendered the two-mile journey a matter of still further difficulty; and at a later period this slough became spattered with derelict motor-lorries which had become engulfed in it past all possibility of salvage. These facts are worth noting as illustrating some of the initial difficulties which impeded the transport and supply of “Pamforce”; for Mtuge was destined to be the base of its operations during its thrust into the interior of the Nyassa Company’s territory. Mtuge, as we have seen, could also be reached from Port Amelia by the road which ran round the bay.