[1] The sum was wholly inadequate. M. Erhardt has, I have been told, expended as much on a week’s march from Pangani Town to Fuga. The smallest of Wasawahili pedlars would hardly deem an outfit of 300 dollars sufficient. M. Erhardt was, even according to his own reduced ideas of distance, to march with twenty followers 400 miles, and to explore a lake 300 miles in breadth and of unknown length. In 1802, when cloth and beads were twice their present value in Africa, the black Pombeiros sent by M. Da Costa, superintendent of the “Cassangi Factory,” carried with them for the necessary expenses and presents, goods to the value of nearly 500l. M. Erhardt’s estimate was highly injurious to future travellers: either he knew the truth, and he should have named at once a reasonable estimate, or he was ignorant of the subject, and he should have avoided it. The consequence of his proposal was simply this:—With 5000l. instead of 1000l., the limited sum of the Government grant, the East African Expedition could have explored the whole central area; nothing but the want of supplies caused their return at the time when, after surmounting sickness, hardship, and want of discipline amongst the party, they were ready to push to the extreme end.
At the same time I had laid before the Council of the Royal Geographical Society my desire to form an expedition primarily for the purpose of ascertaining the limits of the “Sea of Ujiji, or Unyamwezi Lake,” and secondarily, to determine the exportable produce of the interior, and the ethnography of its tribes. I have quoted exactly the words of the application. In these days every explorer of Central Africa is supposed to have set out in quest of the coy sources of the White Nile, and when he returns without them, his exploration, whatever may have been its value, is determined to be a failure. The Council honoured my plans with their approval. At their solicitation, the Foreign Office granted the sum of 1000l. for the outlay of the exploration, and the defunct Court of Directors of the late East India Company, who could not be persuaded to contribute towards the expenses, generously allowed me two years’ leave of absence from regimental duty, for the purpose of commanding the Expedition. I also received instructions to report myself to his Excellency the Lord Elphinstone, then Governor of Bombay, and to Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, from whose influence and long experience much was expected.
When the starting-point came to be debated, the Consul strongly objected to an Expedition into the interior viâ Kilwa, on account of the opposition to be expected at a port so distant from the seat of government, where the people, half-caste Arabs and Wasawahili, who are under only a nominal control, still retained a strong predilection for protection, and a violent hostility to strangers. These reasons led him to propose my landing upon the coast opposite Zanzibar, and to my thence marching with a strong escort, despatched by the Arab prince, through the maritime tribes, whose cruel murder of M. Maizan, the first European known to have penetrated beyond the sea-board, was yet fresh in the memories of men. This notion was accepted the more readily, as during my short preliminary sojourn at Zanzibar, I had satisfactorily ascertained from Arab travellers that the Maravi or Kilwa Lake is distinct from the “Sea of Ujiji;” that the former is of comparatively diminutive dimensions; that there is no caravan route between the two; and therefore that, by exploring the smaller, I should lose the chance of discovering the larger water. Moreover, the general feeling of the Zanzibarites—of the Christian merchants, whom I had offended by collecting statistics about copal-digging, ivory, and sesamum—of the Bhattias or Hindus of Cutch, who systematically abuse the protection of the British flag to support the interest of the slave trade—of the Arabs, who remembered nothing but political intrigue in the explorations of the “Mombas Mission,” and the lamentable result of Dr. Krapf’s political intrigues—and of the Africans generally, who are disposed to see in every innovation some new form of evil—had been conveyed to my ears explicitly enough to warrant my apprehensions for the success of the Expedition, had I insisted upon carrying out the project proposed by M. Erhardt.
I must here explain, that before my departure from England, the Church Missionary Society had supplied me, after a personal interview in Salisbury Square, with a letter to their employé, M. Rebmann, the last remnant of that establishment at Mombasah, which had, it is said, expended about 12,000l. with the minimest of results. The missionaries had commenced operations with vigour, and to the work of conversion they had added certain discoveries in the unknown lands of the interior, which attracted the attention of European geographers. Unhappily Dr. Krapf, the principal, happened to commit himself by the following assertion:—“The Imaum of Muskat has not an inch of ground on the coast between the Island of Wassin and the Pangani River; this tract, in fact, belonging to King Kmeri of Usumbara, down from 4° 30′ to 5° 30′ S. The tract, which is very low, is inhabited by the Wasegua tribes, and is the chief slave-market for supplying Zanzibar.”
This “information,” put forth in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (vol. i. p. 203), was copied into the Proceedings (vol. xxiii. p. 106), with the remark, that the territory alluded to was a “supposed possession” of the Imaum. Orientals are thin-skinned upon questions of land; the assertion was directly opposed to fact, and the jealousy of the rival representatives at Zanzibar each on his own side, exaggerated its tendency. Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, who felt his influence sapped by this error on the part of his protégé, had reported the facts to his government. Dr. Krapf had quitted the scene of his labours and discoveries, but his Highness the Sultan and the sadat, or court, retained a lively remembrance of the regretable incident. Before the arrival of the Expedition, “Muhiyy-el-Din,” the Shafei Kazi of the island, had called upon Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, probably by direction of his superiors, and had received an answer, fortified by an oath, that the Expedition was wholly independent of “Dutchmen,” as the missionaries were called by the Zanzibarites. I was compelled, somewhat unwillingly, to dispense with urging M. Rebmann’s presence. By acting in any other way I should have lost the assistance of the consul, and the Arabs, with a ready display of zeal, would have secured for me an inevitable failure.
At six P.M. on Wednesday, the 17th of June, 1857, the Artémise cast anchor off Wale Point, a long, low bush-grown sandspit, about eighty-four miles distant from the little town of Bagamoyo. Our sailing-master, Mohammed bin Khamis, anchored in deep water, throwing out double the length of chain required. For this prudence, however, there was some reason. The road-steads are open; the muddy bottom shelves gradually, almost imperceptibly; the tides retire ten or eleven feet, and a strong gale, accompanied by the dangerous raz de marée, or rollers from seaward, especially at the seasons of the syzygies, with such a shore to leeward, is justly dreaded by the crews of square-rigged vessels.
There is a something peculiarly interesting in the first aspect of the “Mrima,” the hill-land, as this portion of the African coast is called by the islanders of Zanzibar. On one side lies the Indian Ocean, illimitable towards the east, dimpled with its “anerithmon gelasma,” and broken westward by a thin line of foam, creaming upon the whitest and finest of sand, the detritus of coralline and madrepore. It dents the coast deeply, forming bays, bayous, lagoons, and backwaters, where, after breaking their force upon bars and black ledges of sand and rock, upon diabolitos, or sun-stained masses of a coarse conglomerate, and upon strong weirs planted in crescent shape, the waters lie at rest in the arms of the land like sheets of oil. The points and islets formed by these sea-streams are almost flush with the briny surface, yet they are overgrown with a profuse vegetation, the result of tropical suns and copious showers, which supply the want of rich soil. The banks of the backwaters are lined with forests of white and red mangrove. When the tide is out, the cone-shaped root-work supporting each tree rises naked from the deep sea-ooze; parasitical oysters cluster over the trunks at water-level, and between the adults rise slender young shoots, tipped with bunches of brilliant green. The pure white sand is bound together by a kind of convolvulus, whose large fleshy leaves and lilac-coloured flowers creep along the loose soil. Where raised higher above the ocean level, the coast is a wall of verdure. Plots of bald old trees, bent by the regular breezes, betray the positions of settlements which, generally sheltered from sight, besprinkle the coast in a long straggling line, like the suburbs of a populous city. Of these, thirteen were counted in a space of three miles. The monotony of green that clothes the soil is relieved in places by dwarf earth-cliffs and scaurs of rufous hue—East Africa is mostly a red land—and behind the foreground of littoral or alluvial plain, at a distance varying from three to five miles, rises a blue line of higher level, conspicuous even from Zanzibar Island, the sandy raised beach now the frontier of the wild men. To this sketch add its accompaniment; by day, the plashing of the wave, and the scream of the gull, with the perpetual hum and buzz of insect life; and, after sunset, the deep, dead silence of a tropical night, broken only by the roar of the old bull-crocodile at his resting-time, the qua-qua of the night-heron, and the shouts and shots of the watchmen, who know from the grunts of the hippopotamus, struggling up the bank, that he is quitting his watery home to pay a visit to their fields.
We were delayed ten days off Wale Point by various preliminaries to departure. Said bin Salim, a half-caste Arab of Zanzibar, who, sorely against his will, was ordered by the prince to act as Ras Kafilah, or caravan-guide, had, after ceaseless and fruitless prayers for delay, preceded us about a fortnight, for the purpose of collecting porters. The timid little man, whose nerves were shaken to weeping-point by the terrors of the way, and by the fancy that, thus cooperating with the exploration, he was incurring the hatred of his fellows, had “taken the shilling,” in the shape of 500 dollars, advanced from public funds by the consul, with a promise of an ample reward in hard coin, and a gold watch, “si se bene gesserit:” at the same time Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton had warned me against trusting to a half-caste. Accompanied by a Cutch Banyan of the Bhattia caste, by name Ramji—of whom more anon—he had crossed over, on the 1st of June, to the main-land, and had hired a gang of porters, who, however, hearing that their employer was a Muzungu, a “white man,” at once dispersed, forgetting to return their hire. About one hundred and seventy men were required; only thirty-six were procurable. The large amount of carriage was necessitated by the bulky and ponderous nature of African specie, cotton cloth, brass-wire, and beads, of which a total of seventy loads was expended in one year and nine months. Moreover, under the impression that “vert and venison” abounded in the interior, I had provided ammunition for two years,—ten thousand copper-caps of sizes, forty boxes, each restricted, for convenience of porterage, to forty pounds, and containing ball, grape, and shot, six fire-proof magazines, and two small barrels of fine powder, weighing in total fifty pounds, together with four ten-pound kegs of a coarser kind for the escort,—in all, two hundred rounds for each individual of the party. This supply was deemed necessary on account of the immense loss to which ammunition is subjected by theft and weather in these lands.
On the second day after anchoring off Wale Point, a native boat brought on board the Artémise Ladha Damha, the collector of customs at Zanzibar, who, in compliment to Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, of old his friend and patron, had torn himself from his beloved occupations to push the departure of the Expedition. Ladha, hearing that the Arab merchants had hastened to secure their gangs before corrupted by the more liberal offers of the “white men,”—“Pagazi,” or porters, being at that time scarce, because the caravans from the interior had not yet reached the coast,—proposed to send forward the thirty-six fellows hired by Said bin Salim, with orders to await the arrival of their employer at Zungomero, in the land of K’hutu, a point situated beyond the plundering maritime tribes. These men carried goods to the value of 654 dollars German crowns (each 4s. 2d.), and they received for hire 124 dollars; rations, that is to say, 1·50 lbs. of grain per diem, not included: they preferred to travel with the escort of two slave-musketeers rather than to incur the fancied danger of accompanying a “Muzungu,” though followed by a well-armed party. For the personal baggage and the outfit necessary for crossing the maritime region, which reached by waste the figure of 295 dollars, asses were proposed by Ladha Damha: Zanzibar and the mainland harbours were ransacked, and in a short time thirty animals, good, bad, and indifferent, were fitted for the roads with large canvas bags and vile Arab packsaddles, composed of damaged gunny-bags stuffed with straw. It was necessary to leave behind, till a full gang of porters could be engaged, the greater part of the ammunition, the iron boat which had proved so useful on the coasting voyage to Mombasah, and the reserve supply of cloth, wire, and beads, valued at 359 dollars. The Hindus promised faithfully to forward these articles, and received 150 dollars for the hire of twenty-two men, who were to start in ten days. Nearly eleven months, however, elapsed before they appeared; caravan after caravan came up from the coast, yet the apathetic Bhattias pretended want of porters as the cause of their delay. Evidently my preparations were hurriedly made; strong reasons, however, urged me on,—delay, even for a few days, might have been fatal.
During the brief detention off Wale Point, the latitudes and longitudes of the estuary of the Kingani, the main artery of these regions, and of the little settlements Bagamoyo and Kaole,—strongly against the advice of Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, who declared that by such proceedings the Expedition was going to the bad,—were laid down by my companion: a novice lunarian, he was assisted by Mohammed bin Khamis, who had read his “Norie” in England. Various visits to the hippopotamus haunts produced little beyond the damaging of the corvette’s gig, which, suddenly uplifted from the water upon the points of two tusks, showed two corresponding holes in her bottom. Nor did I neglect to land as often as possible at Kaole, the point of departure upon the mainland, for the purpose of making sketches with the pen and pencil, of urging on preparations, and of gathering those items of “bazar-gup,” i. e., tittle-tattle, that represents the labours of the “fourth estate” in Eastern lands.