Snakes are neither numerous nor deadly: possibly the climate, as in Ireland and Bermuda, is too damp for them. I heard of a python[[51]] resembling that of Madagascar and India; it is 13 feet long, and thick as a man’s thigh. Its favourite habitat is in sugar-cane patches near water, and it is occasionally fatal to a dog. There are water-snakes in the harbour, like those once supposed to be peculiar to Western India. The people speak of a green ‘whip-snake’—vaguest of terms—whose vertebræ appear through the skin, and there are the usual legends of a venomous tree-serpent which can shoot itself like an arrow. The pagan Mganga or Medicine-man ties above the snake-wound a circle of wire with two small bits of wood strung upon it. This, he says, prevents the venom ascending; and doubtless the ligature is for half an hour or so effective. The people have ‘Fiss’ or serpent-stones, which suggest the Irish murrain-stones. Englishmen of undoubted character have recounted cures effected by this remedy, which was so mysterious before capillary attraction robbed it of its marvel.
There is a variety of small tiliquæ, and of large black earth-lizards. One species, with melancholy chirrup and unpleasant aspect, supplies the people with Herodotean tales. It is, they say, a hermaphrodite, and its flanks are torn by its young during parturition. The chameleon also suffers from the popular belief that it kills men with its breath. Scorpions are small, and not so common as in the interior: the animal is mashed and applied as a poultice to its own wound, which may derive some benefit from the moisture. Centipedes haunt houses that are not cleaned and whitewashed, and millipedes abound in every plantation.
The fish supply is variable[[52]] as the climate. Sometimes it is excellent; at other times none but the poorest will eat it, and there are many species considered always poisonous.[[53]] It is most abundant in the S. West monsoon, when small fry may be caught in the still waters of the harbour. Sharks are large and numerous, especially near Chumbi (La Passe) Island, where all the best fish is netted; hut these tigers of the sea do not injure the bathers on the beach. Though the shark is easily hooked in the very harbour, many cargoes of its salted meat are annually imported from Oman. The liver-oil is used to anoint the body: and when Europe requires a succadeneum for huile de morue, I shall recommend to her this shark-oil as an article of superior nauseousness.
The whale fishery reminds us of what it was on the Brazilian coast a century ago. The mammals are sometimes found in soundings, and a wounded sperm-whale lately entered Zanzibar harbour. In May, June, and July, ships of 200 to 600 tons visit the waters south of Mafiyah Island; if the capricious leviathan be not found there and then, it is waste time to cruise about. In July, and at the beginning of the N. East monsoon, schools migrate up the coast in search of food as far as the Red Sea. From 30 to 60 lbs. of ambergris have been brought in one year to the island, and a little of it is exported to Europe. This high-priced article (1 lb. = £14) is taken from the rectum of the spermaceti whale: it seems to have caused constipation and disease, and the oil drawn from these fish is yellow and bad. The Arabs burn it in pastiles, and use it not only internally but externally like musk. Old travellers report that the Somal taught camels to hunt for it by the scent, in the same way as pigs learn to find truffles; and the tale has been told to modern travellers. The main virtue of ambergris is probably its heavy price.
The celebrated ‘Sir’ (Seer) fish, a corruption from Shir Mahi (شير ماهی) or ‘tiger fish,’ so called on account of its armature, known to the Arabs as Kunad (کناد) and in parts of India termed ‘Surmá,’ appears, for about a fortnight, at Zanzibar during its period of migration northwards in May and June. There are also ‘pomfrets,’ scates, soles which are small and not prized, and red and gدrey mullet, excellent in July, August, and September. The remora and the flying-fish enter the harbour; the hippocampus is known; there are mangrove-oysters, ‘oysters growing on trees’—a favourite subject with all old and with many new African travellers—and a small well-flavoured, rock oyster, a favourite relish with Europeans, caught about Chumbi Island. I saw no lobsters, so common in the Camaroons river of Western Africa. The sands abound in Medusæ, or jelly-fish, and in a large cray-fish, which the Arabs consider wholesome for invalids: it makes a rather insipid salad, but it is excellent when dressed after the fashion of the Slave Coast. The receipt is worth giving, and may be found useful in England. The meat, taken out after boiling, is pounded and mixed with peppers and seasoning. It is then restored to the shell, the whole is baked in the oven, and, served up piping hot, it forms an admirable ‘whet.’ Another kind of shell-fish is indeed a ‘soft crab;’ when cooked it seems to melt away, no meat remaining within: a third, also soft, is red even before being boiled. On every unfrequented strip of sand or weed small crabs gather in thousands; most of them have only one large claw, and their colours are a brilliant pink, pearly white, violet, and tender red.
The seas are little explored (1857), and there are legends of ichthyological marvels which remind us of European romantic zoology. I was told by Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton of a fish, possibly one of the Murænidæ, measuring nine feet long by three in diameter: the shape was somewhat like a leech, both extremities being similar; the ribs resembled, but were rather flatter than, those of a bullock, and the flesh had the appearance of beef. A specimen, he said, had lately been brought from Kipombui, a small harbour opposite Zanzibar; the prey, however, is always cut up as soon as caught. This reminds us of the ‘full-sized devil-fish’ of the West Indian seas. The Arabs describe a monstrous polypus, with huge eyes and arms 10 feet long: they declare that it has entangled bathers and pulled them down close to shore. It is, in fact, the ‘piuvre,’ so famed of late; and since I left Zanzibar a French illustrated newspaper showed one of these horrors grappling with a man of war’s gig. Thus Oppian described a fish that smothered mariners with its monstrous wings, and drew them under water wrapped in a lethal embrace. Nieuhoff (Brazil, 1640) mentions a ‘lamprey’ at Pernambuco that ‘snatched all that fell in this way (both men and dogs that swam sometimes after the boat) into the water.’ Finally, Carsten Niebuhr (Arabia, chap. i. p. 140. 1762) declares that ‘the cuttle-fish is dangerous to swimmers and divers, of whom it lays hold with its long claws; these do not wound, but produce swelling, internal pains, and often an incipient paralysis.’
Sponge is found in abundance, but when dry it decays. Fine conchological collections were chiefly made in former years. The merchants spoiled the market by supplying whole cargos for watch-dials and for polishing porcelain. Slaves still fasten their canoes to the several banks in the roadstead, and find in the transparent waters the murex and other prized specimens. The harp-shell and ‘double-harp’ are found upon the softer sands enveloped in the folds of their owners; thus parasites cannot ruin their beautiful and brilliant hues. The ‘Kheti,’ or common cowrie, is picked up when the tide is out in vast quantities by the coast people, from Ra’as Hafun to Mozambique. Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton was fortunate enough in those early days to obtain two specimens of the Cypræa Broderipii, or orange-cowrie, with a stripe down the dorsum. Exaggerated ideas of its value had been spread, and it was reported that £500 had been offered for a single shell. The cowrie trade of Zanzibar was begun by M. E. P. Herz, of Hamburg. He made a daring speculation, and supplanted in Western Africa the rare and expensive Hindostan shell by the coarse, cheap Cypræa of this coast. During the last century the Portuguese used to export cowries for Angola from the Rio das Caravelhas, in Brazilian Porto Seguro. The success of M. Herz’s investment opened a mine of wealth. M. Oswald (senior), afterwards Prussian Consul-general at Hamburg, commenced as half-owner of a small vessel which shipped cowries at Zanzibar, and traded with them for palm-oil at Appi Vista, Whydah, Porto Novo, and lastly Lagos, on the Slave Coast. As the sack was bought for $O.50 to $1.44, and sold for $8 to $9, the trip cleared $24,000 (£4800), paid half in coin, half in ‘oil;’ and the single vessel soon increased to three. The owner was an excellent ship-master, who carefully supplied his employées with maps, charts, and sailing directions. He died in 1859, leaving a self-insuring fleet of 18 sail. In 1863 his sons had raised the number to 24, and they kept up large establishments at Lagos and Zanzibar.
The retail cowrie trade was solely in the hands of Moslems; the Banyans would not sanction the murder of their possible grandmothers. On the Continent, as on the Island, the shells are sunned till the fish dies and decays, spreading a noxious fœtor through the villages. The collection is then stored in holes till exported to Zanzibar. There the European wholesale merchant garbles, washes, and stows away the shells in bags for shipment. They are sold by the ‘Jizleh,’ a weight varying according to the size of the shell: from 3 to 3.50 sacks would be the average. The price of the Jizleh presently rose to $7, to $8, and in 1859 it was about $9. Seven vessels were then annually engaged in carrying cargoes from Zanzibar to Lagos and its vicinity. This rude money finds its way to Tinbuktu (Timbuctoo) and throughout Central Africa, extending from the East to places as yet unvisited by Europeans. Of late years, however, the increased metallic currency has caused the cowrie trade to fall off, and the steady rate of decrease shows that shell money is doomed.
Here, as in Western India, the rains bring forth a multitude of pests. The rooms when lighted at night are visited by cockroaches and flying ants; scarabæi and various mantidæ; moths and ‘death’s heads’ of marvellous hideousness. Giant snails (achatinæ), millepedes, and beetles crawl over the country, and the firefly glances through the shade. Mosquitos are said not to be troublesome, but in an inner room I found curtains necessary; the house-fly is a torment to irritable skins. Fleas, and the rest of the ‘piquante population,’ are most numerous during the north-east monsoon. The bug, which was held to be an importation, is now thoroughly naturalized upon the Island; in the interior it is as common as in the cities of Egypt and of Syria, where a broken rafter will discharge a living shower. I could not, however, hear anything of the ‘Pási bug,’ which, according to Dr Krapf, causes burnings, chills, and fever. He made it to rival the celebrated Meeanee (Muganaj) bug, the Acarus Persicus, whose exceedingly poisonous bite was supposed to be fatal. In the Lake Regions of Central Africa (1.371) I have conjectured that the word is a corruption for Papazi, a carrapato, or tick. So Dr Krapf writes in the German way ‘Sansibar’ for Zanzibar.
The ants in Zanzibar, as in the Brazil, require especial study, and almost every kind of tree appears to have its peculiar tenantry. Upon the clove there is a huge black pismire whose nip burns like fire; as it has a peculiarly evil savour, tainting even the unaromatic ‘bush,’ it is mashed and stuffed up the nostrils as a cure for snake-bites. The Copal is colonized by a semi-transparent ginger-coloured formica, whose every bite draws blood, and the mango-leaf is doubled up by a smaller variety into the semblance of a bird’s nest. The horrible odour in parts of the bush, which young African travellers attribute to malaria and which often leads them to suspect the presence of carrion, generally proceeds from ants: I remarked this especially when visiting Abeokuta and other places in West Africa. Throughout the interior ‘drivers,’ as they are sensibly termed on the Guinea Coast, visit the huts in armies, and soon clear them of all offal. A small black ant attacks meat, and the best way to procure a clean skeleton is to expose the body near its haunt; beware, however, of cats and dogs. As in Africa generally, the termite is a plague; this small animal greatly obstructs civilization by the ravages which it commits upon books and manuscripts.