In February, 1799, Captain Bissel, R.N., commanding H. M.’s ship Orestes, with the Leopard carrying Admiral Blankett’s flag, touched at the island for refreshments when beating up against the N. E. monsoon towards the Red Sea. He briefly but faithfully described its geography, and he laid down sailing directions which to this day are retained in Horsburgh. Since then many coasting voyages have been made by naval officers and others, who collected from natives, with more or less fidelity, details concerning the inner country. As early as 1811, Captain Smee and Lieutenant Hardy were sent by the Bombay government to gather information on the eastern seaboard of Africa, and they brought back sundry novel details (Transactions Bombay Geographical Society, 1844, p. 23, &c.). Between the years 1822-1826 the whole coast line was surveyed by Captain (afterwards Admiral) W. F. Owen, and by his officers, Captains Vidal, Boteler, and others. Their charts and plans of the littoral, despite sundry inaccuracies, such as placing Zanzibar Island five miles west of its proper position, excited general attention, and were justly termed by a modern author miranda tabularum series. During this Herculean labour, which occupied three years, some 300 of the officers and crew fell victims to the climate of the Coast, to the hardships of boat-work, and to the ferocity of the natives. In 1822 Sir Robert Townsend Fairfax, Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Mauritius, after a crusade against the slave-trade in the dominions of Radáma, King of the Hovas, commissioned Captain (afterwards Admiral) Fairfax Moresby, of H. M.’s ship Menai, to draft a treaty between England and Maskat for limiting the traffic. The mission was successful. The sale of Somalis, a free people, was made piracy; and the Sayyid’s vessels were subject to seizure by the Royal, including the Company’s, cruizers, if detected carrying negroes ‘to the east of a line drawn from Cape Delgado, passing south of Socotra and on to Diu, the west point of the Gulf of Cambay.’[Cambay.’][[14]] In 1822, the Sayyid’s assent having been formally accorded, Captain Moresby left the coast.

In January, 1834, Captain Hart, of H. M.’s ship Imogene, visited Zanzibar, and submitted to the Imperial government brief notes, appending a list of the Sayyid’s squadron then in the harbour, with their age, tonnage, armature, and other particulars. Still geographers declared that Zanzibar was a more mysterious spot to England and India than parts of Central Africa and the shores of the Icy Sea.[[15]] During the same year the energetic Mr W. Bollaert matured the plan of an expedition, to be conducted by himself, from Zanzibar across the continent. It was laid before the Geographical Society in 1837, but it was not carried out, funds being deficient. In 1835 the U. S. frigate Peacock visited the island during a treaty-making tour, and was supplied with all her wants gratis, the port officials declaring that ‘H. H. the Sultan of Muscat had forbidden them to take any remuneration.’ The surgeon, Dr Ruschenherger (Narrative of a Voyage round the World in 1835-1837), left a realistic description of the city in those its best days. He acknowledges the hospitalities of ‘Captain Hasan bin Ibrahim, of the Arab Navy,’ superintendent of the ‘Prince Said Carlid.’ The latter was the late Sayyid Khalid, then 16 years old. The book, being written by a ‘Dutch-American’ in 1835, is of course bitterly hostile to England. We are told that the keel of the Peacock, passing between Tumbatu Island and Zanzibar, scraped over coral reefs not in Owen’s charts—which may be true. Followed the American Captains Fisher, Drinker, Abbott, and Osgood, and Mr Ross Brown, then a young traveller in a trading-vessel. He also published a readable account of the rising settlement.

When Admiral Sir Charles Malcolm, a name endeared to eastern geographers, was giving energy and impulse to exploration in Western Asia, the late Lieut. W. Christopher, I. N., commanding the H. E. I. C.’s brig-of-war Tigris, was sent to Zanzibar; he made a practical survey of the coast, and he touched at many places now famous—Kilwa (Quiloa), Mombasah, Brava, Marka, Gob-wen (or the Jub River), and Makdishu, or Hanir, by the Portuguese called Magadoxo. He explored the lower waters of a large stream, the Webbe (River) Ganana, or Shebayli (Leopard), which he injudiciously named the Haines River; and he visited Giredi and other settlements till then unknown. He wrote (May 8, 1843) a highly interesting and comprehensive account of the seaboard, which was published in the Journal of the Geographical Society (vol. xiv. of 1844). His plans, charts, and other valuable memoranda were forwarded to the Bombay Government, and the enterprising traveller died in July, 1848, at the early age of 36, from the effects of a wound received before Multan.

The honour of having made the first systematic attempt to explore and to open up the Zanzibar interior, is due to the establishment popularly known as the ‘Mombas Mission;’ its energetic members proved that it was possible to penetrate beyond the coast, and their discoveries excited a spirit of inquiry which led to the exploration of the Lake Regions. In 1842 the Rev. Dr J. Lewis Krapf, being refused readmittance to Shoa, received a ‘Macedonian call’ to East Africa; in other words, he undertook in 1842, with the approbation of the Church Missionary Society, a coasting voyage to East Africa south of the line. Having visited Zanzibar Island he journeyed northwards (March 1844), and met with a kind reception at Mombasah where he accidentally landed; finally he established his head-quarters amongst the Wanyika tribe at Rabai Mpia near Mombasah, which then became the base of his operations. He was joined (June 1846) by the Rev. J. Rebmann of Gerlingen in Würtemberg, and by Messrs Erhardt and Wagner—the latter a young German mechanic, who died shortly after arrival. In June 2, 1851, came Messrs Conrad Diehlmann and Christian Pfefferle, who soon died. They were followed by three mechanics, Hagemann, Kaiser, and Metzler, who returned home, and by M. Deimler who retired to Bombay. M. Rebmann after visiting Kadiaro (Oct. 14, 1847) made in May 11, 1843 the first of three important journeys into the ‘Jagga’ highlands, and discovered, or rather rediscovered, the much vexed Kilima-njaro. The existence of this mountain bearing eternal snows in eastern intertropical Africa is thus alluded to in the Suma de Geographia of Fernandez de Enciso (1530): ‘West of this port (Mombasah) stands the Mount Olympus of Ethiopia, which is exceedingly high, and beyond it are the “Mountains of the Moon,” in which are the sources of the Nile.’ The discovery was confirmed by Dr Krapf, who after visiting (also in 1848) Fuga, the capital of Usumbara, made two journeys (in 1849 and 1851) into Ukambani. During the first he confirmed the position of Kilima-njaro, and he sighted another snowy peak, Kenia, Kegnia, or Kirenia.

The assertions of the missionaries were variously received. M. Vaux was thereby enabled to explain a statement in the Metereologica of Aristotle, where the first or main stream of the Nile is supposed to flow out of the mountain called Silver. Dr Beke accepted the meridional snowy range, and here placed his Mountains of the Moon, a hypothesis first advanced in 1846. The sceptics were headed by Mr W. D. Cooley, who in 1854 had published his ‘Claudius Ptolemy and the Nile.’ He had identified the mountain of Selene (σελήνη) with the snowy highland of ‘Semenai’ or ‘Samien’ in northern Abyssinia, and thus by adopting a mere verbal resemblance he had obtained a system of truly ‘lunatic mountains.’ Some years before (Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xv. 1845) appeared his paper entitled, ‘The Geography of N’yassi, or the great lake of Southern Africa investigated,’ a complicated misnomer. The article was written in a clear style and a critical tone, showing ample reading but lacking a solid foundation of fact. It began as usual with Pigafetta and de Barros, and it ended with Gamitto and Monteiro; the peroration, headed ‘Harmony of Authorities,’ was a self-gratulation, a song of triumph concerning the greatness of hypothetical discoveries, which were soon proved to be purely fanciful. Not one man in a million has the instincts of a good comparative geographer, and the author was assuredly not that exceptional man. His monograph did good by awaking the scientific mind, but it greatly injured popular geography. It unhappily asserted (p. 15) that ‘in every part of eastern Africa to which our inquiries have extended, snow is quite unknown.’ And the author having laid down his law bowed before it, and expected Fact as well as the Public to do the same; he even attacked the text of Ptolemy, asserting that the passages treating of the Nile sources and the Lunar Mountains were an interpolation of a comparatively recent date. In June and November 1863 the late Baron von der Decken, accompanied by Dr Kersten, an accomplished astronomical observer, ascended some 1300 feet, saw a clearly defined limit of perpetual snow at about 17,000 feet, and by a rough triangulation gave the main peak of Kilima-njaro an elevation of 20,065 feet. Still Mr Cooley, with singular want of candour, denied existence to the snow. It was the same with his ‘Single Sea,’ which under the meaningless and erroneous name ‘N’yassi’ again supplanted Ptolemy’s Lakes, and this want of acumen offered the last insult to African geography. Thus was revived the day when the Arab and Portuguese geographers made the three Niles (of Egypt, Magadoxo, and Nigritia) issue from one vast reservoir, and thus were the school maps of the world disfigured during half a generation. The lake also was painfully distorted, simply that it might ‘run parallel to the line of volcanic action drawn through the Isle de Bourbon, the north of Madagascar, and the Comoro Islands, and to one of the two lines predominating on the coasts of southern Africa wherever there are no alluvial flats.’ It abounded, moreover, in minor but significant errors, such as confounding ‘Zanganyika,’ a town or tribe, with Tanganyika, the name of the Lake. Of late years Mr Cooley has once more shifted his position, and has declared that he did not intend to provide central intertropical Africa between ‘Monomotapa’ and Angola with a single lake. The whole of his paper on the ‘Geography of N’yassi’ means that if it mean anything. He is not, however, the only Proteus—hard to find and harder to bind—amongst African geographers.

To conclude this notice of the ‘Mombas Mission,’ Dr Krapf again visited Fuga, where he was followed by Mr Erhardt, and finally the two missionaries ran down the coast, touched at Kilwa, and extended their course to Cape Delgado. In August 1855 Dr Krapf, after 18 years’ residence in Africa, bade it farewell; he did not revisit it except for a few months in 1867, when he acted dragoman to the Abyssinian Expedition. In January 1856 appeared what has been called the ‘Mombas Mission Map’ (Skizze nach J. Erhardt’s Original), the result of exploration and of notices collected from the natives. It was accompanied by a ‘Memoir of the Chart of East and Central Africa, compiled by J. Erhardt and J. Rebmann.’ This production was ‘remarked upon’ by Mr Cooley (Jan. 8, 1856), and in turn his remarks were remarked upon by Herr Petermann. The peculiar feature of the chart was a ‘monster slug’-like inland Sea extending from the line to S. Lat. 14°,—an impossible Caspian some 840 miles long × 200 to 300 in breadth. I have already explained that this error arose by the fact that the three chief caravan routes from the Zanzibar coast abut upon three several lakes which, in the confusion of African vocabulary—Nyassa being corrupted to N’yassi, and Nyanza also signifying water—were naturally thrown into one. It was, however, to ascertain the existence of this slug-shaped article that the East African Expedition of 1856-59 was sent out.

The most valuable results of Dr Krapf’s labours are his works on the Zanzibarian languages, and these deserve the gratitude of every traveller and student of African philology. The principal are,

Messrs Krapf’s and Isenberg’s imperfect outline of the Galla language (London, 1840).

Messrs Krapf and Isenberg, ‘Vocabulary of the Galla Language,’ London, 1840.

Tentamen imbecillum Translationis Evangelii Joannis in linguam Gallorum, London, 1841.