During this lull we landed, as the reader has been told in the last chapter, upon the African isle ‘Menouthias.’
NOTE.
I may be excused in here alluding to an assertion often repeated by the ‘Geographer of N’gassi,’ in his Memoir on the ‘Lake Regions of East Africa reviewed’ (London, Stanford, 1864). He makes me ‘the easy dupe of the most transparent personal hostility, which wore the respectable mask of the Royal Geographical Society,’ and he assures me that I left England ‘indoctrinated’ as to what lake or lakes I should find in Central Africa, and so forth.
This fretfulness of mortified vanity would not have been noticed by me had it not been so unfair to the Royal Geographical Society. In the preface of my Memoir (pp. 4-8, Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xxix.), I was careful to print all the instructions of the Expeditionary Committee, and I only regretted that they were not more detailed. It is absurd to assert of a traveller that he ‘visited the lake regions with a confirmed inclination to divide the lake.’ What interest can he have in bringing home any but the fullest and most exact details? The petty differences between himself and the Royal Geographical Society, which Mr Cooley assumes all the world to know, were utterly unknown to me when I left England in 1856; and, greatly despising such things, I have never since inquired into the subject. Returning home in 1859, I learned with surprise that the Comparative Geographer’ still stood upon his ‘Single Sea,’ and considered any one who dared to make two or three of it his personal enemy. That such should be the mental state of a gentleman who has not, they say, taken leave of his wits, was a phenomenon which justified my wonder; nor could I believe it till the pages of the Athenæum proceeded to give me proof positive. It is melancholy to see a laborious literary man, whose name might stand so high, thus display the caput mortuum of his intellect.
P.S. Another mortuary notice! My good old friend Mr Macqueen has also passed away at a ripe age, leaving behind him the memory of a laborious and useful life, especially devoted to the cause of Africa and the Africans.
CHAPTER IV.
A STROLL THROUGH ZANZIBAR CITY.
‘E dahi se foi à Ilha de Zanzibar, que he aquèm de Mombaça vinte leguas e tão pegada à terra firma que as náos que passarem per entre ellas, hão de ser vistas.’—De Barros, 1, vii. 4.
And first of the Port.
Zanzibar harbour is a fine specimen of the true Atoll, barrier or fringing reef, built upon a subsiding foundation, probably of sandstone. The original lagoon, charged with sediment and washings from the uplands, must have burst during some greater flood, and split into narrow water-ways the one continuous coralline rim. The same influences may account for the gaps in the straight-lined reef whose breach gave a name to Brazilian Pernambuco.
The port varies in depth from 9 to 13 fathoms, with overfalls, and the rise of the tide is 13 feet. Here the Hormos Episalos (statio fluctuosa, or open roadstead of the Periplus, chap. 8) has been converted into a basin by the industry of the lithophyte. These ants of the ocean have built up an arc of