ZANZIBAR TOWN FROM THE SEA.
THE
LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA.
CHAPTER I.
WE QUIT ZANZIBAR ISLAND IN DIGNIFIED STYLE.
At noon, on the 16th of June, 1857, the corvette Artémise, after the usual expenditure of gunpowder which must in Eastern lands announce every momentous event, from the birth of a prince to the departure of a bishop, slowly gliding out of Zanzibar harbour, afforded us a farewell glance at the whitewashed mosques and houses of the Arabs, the cadjan-huts, the cocoa-grown coasts, and the ruddy hills striped with long lines of clove. Onwards she stole before a freshening breeze, the balmy breath of the Indian Ocean, under a sun that poured a flood of sparkling light over the azure depths and the bright green shallows around, between the “elfin isles” of Kumbeni, with its tall trees, and Chumbi, tufted with dense thickets, till the white sandstrip mingled with the blue ocean, the gleaming line of dwarf red cliff and scaur dropped into the water’s edge, the land faded from emerald to brown, and from brown to hazy purple, the tufts of the trees seemed first to stand out of, then to swim upon, the wave, and as evening, the serenest of tropical evenings, closed in over sky, earth, and sea, a cloud-like ridge, dimly discernible from our quarter, was all that remained of Zanzibar.
I will not here stay the course of my narrative to inform the reader that Zanzibar is not, as the Cyclopædias declare, “an island of Africa, governed by a king who is subject to the Portuguese;” that it is not, as the Indian post-offices appear to believe, a part of the Persian Gulf; nor, as homekeeping folk, whose notions of African geography are somewhat dim and ill-defined, have mentally determined, a rock in the Red Sea, nor a dependency of the Niger, nor even an offshoot of the Cape of Storms.
The Artémise is a kind of “Jackass-frigate,” an 18-gun corvette, teak-built in Bombay, with a goodly breadth of beam, a slow sailer, but a sure. In the days of our deceased ally, Sayyid Said, the misnamed “Imaum of Muscat,” she had so frequently been placed by his Highness at the disposal of his old friend Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, that she had acquired the sobriquet of “the Balyuz or Consul’s yacht.” On this occasion she had been fitted up for a cruise to the mainland; her yards, usually struck, had been swayed up and thrown across; her top spars had been transferred from the hold to their proper place; her ropes and rigging, generally hanging in tatters about her sticks, had been carefully overhauled; her old sails had been bent, and her usual crew, a few slaves that held their own with difficulty against a legion of rats and an army of cockroaches, had been increased to its full complement of twenty men. His Highness the Sayyid Majid, who after the demise of his father had assumed the title of “Sultan of Zanzibar and the Sawahil,” came on board accompanied by his four brothers, of whom two—Sayyids Jamshid and Hamdan—died of small-pox before our return, and one—Sayyid Barghash—has lately become a state prisoner at Bombay, to bid what proved a last adieu to his father’s friend. At the same time His Highness honoured me, through his secretary, Ahmed bin Nuuman, more generally known as Wajhayn, or “Two-faces,” with three letters of introduction, to Musa Mzuri, the Indian doyen of the merchants settled at Unyamwezi, to the Arabs there resident, and to all his subjects who were travelling into the interior.
The Artémise conveyed the personnel and the matériel of the East African Expedition, namely, the two European members—my companion and myself—two Portuguese, or rather half-caste Goanese “boys,” two Negro gun-carriers, the Seedy Mubarak Mombai (Bombay), and Muinyi Mabruki, his “brother,” and finally, eight so-called “Baloch” mercenaries, a guard appointed by the Sultan to accompany me. Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, at that time Her Majesty’s consul and Hon. East India Company’s agent at Zanzibar, though almost lethargic from the effects of protracted illness—he lived only in the evening—had deemed it his duty to land us upon the coast, and to superintend our departure from the dangerous seaboard. He was attended by Mr. Frost, the apothecary attached to the consulate, whose treatment for a fatal liver-complaint appeared to consist of minute doses of morphia and a liberal diet of sugar.
By Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton’s advice, I ventured to modify the scheme of the East African Expedition, as originally proposed by the Expeditionary Committee of the Royal Geographical Society of London. In 1855, M. Erhardt, an energetic member of the hapless “Mombas Mission,” had on his return to London offered to explore a vast mass of water, about the size of the Caspian, which, from the information of divers “natives,” he had deposited in slug or leech shape in the heart of Intertropical Africa, thus prolonging the old “Maravi,” or “Moravim Lake” of Portuguese travellers and school atlases, to the north of the equator, and thus bringing a second deluge upon sundry provinces and kingdoms thoroughly well known for the last half century. He had proposed to land, with an outfit of 300 dollars[1], at Kilwa, one of the southern ports of the Zanzibar mainland, to hire a score of Wasawahili porters, to march with a caravan upon the nearest point of his own water, and to launch an adventurous canoe upon a lake which, according to his map, could not be traversed under twenty-five days. Messrs. Erhardt and Krapf, of the “Mombas Mission,” spent, it is true, a few hours at Kilwa, where they were civilly entreated by the governor and the citizens; but they egregiously deceived themselves and others, when they concluded that they could make that place their ingress-point. Lieut. Christopher, I.N., who visited the East African coast in 1843, wisely advised explorers to avoid the neighbourhood of Kilwa. Wisely, I repeat: the burghers of that proud old settlement had, only a year before my arrival, murdered, by means of the Wangindo savages, an Arab merchant who ventured to lay open the interior.