‘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.’