The Government stables at Zanzibar also contain a few mules brought from the Persian Gulf. They become liable to inveterate drowsiness; they start when approached, refuse food and drink, and soon succumb to the climate. The ass, on the contrary, here as in the East African interior, thrives even upon hard food, and consequently it is prized by the Arabs. There are many breeds. During the season fine animals are brought from Oman; iron-grey mares with white legs being preferred; Bahrayn and the Persian Gulf send a large light-coloured beast, resembling that of Baghdad; it is not, however, considered lasting. Asses imported from Brava and the Somali country are held fit only for carrying burdens, and the Unyamwezi breed, known by its lopped ears, though strong and serviceable, is always but half tamed, and is often vicious. The most useful and lasting are the Mutawallid or Muwallid, the progeny of Maskat beasts, Creoles born upon the Island—these we were advised to buy before leaving for the interior. I subsequently purchased thirty, and the last died within six months of landing: we then mounted Unyamwezi animals, and had nothing to complain of. Asses are ridden, as they always should he, upon the crupper; the ‘hulús’ are rather pads than saddles, covered with thick cloths and black sheepskins; no one uses stirrups, and the bridle is the rudest of contrivances. The price of donkeys ranges from $15 to $100: I bought a tolerable riding animal for $60, and I heard of one costing $350. Finally, the Sayyid keeps for the use of his plantation-mills a few miserable mangy camels from Brava and Makdishu: they may be worth $10 to $12 a-head.

Mounted on the Prince’s best we passed through the town, where the long sharp poles projecting from the low house-eaves are not pleasant to those riding spirited nags. This is the labour hour, and all are not inactive. The weaver on his raised clay bench, and shaded by his dwarf verandah, is engaged upon a turban, whilst his neighbour converts copal, reddened by cinnabar, into ear-rings and other ornaments. The tinsmith and the Comoro blacksmith, with the usual African bellows, are also at work hammering at pots and pans, fashioning the normal weapons, arrow and spear heads, and repairing old guns. The leather-worker is moulding a targe of rhinoceros-hide, apparently all umbo, and the vendors of oil and grain, spices and drugs, glass and ‘potions,’ are on the alert. By the way we walked into the partially-walled compound or court representing the slave-market, a bonâ fide affair, not like the caravanserai which used to be fitted up and furnished by the Cairene Dragoman for the inspection of curious tourists. In 1835 a wooden cage some 20 feet square often contained some 150 men, women, and children, who every day were ‘knocked down’ to the highest bidder in the public ‘place.’ In those times the yearly importation was 6000 to 7000. The bazar was subsequently held in the Changani Quarter, near the Western Point; the late Sayyid, however, having forbidden, by way of sop to the British Cerberus, the sale of men in the streets of Zanzibar as of Maskat, it was shifted to a plantation called Kirungani. As this was found inconveniently distant, it migrated to its present site. Lines of negroes stood like beasts, the broker calling out ‘bazar khush!’—the least hideous of the black faces, some of which appeared hardly human, were surmounted by scarlet night-caps. All were horridly thin, with ribs protruding like the circles of a cask, and not a few squatted sick on the ground. The most interesting were the small boys, who grinned as if somewhat pleased by the degrading and hardly decent inspection to which both sexes and all ages were subjected. The woman-show appeared poor and miserable; there was only one decent-looking girl, with carefully blacked eye-brows. She seemed modest, and had probably been exposed for sale in consequence of some inexcusable offence against decorum. As a rule, no one buys adult domestic slaves, male or female, for the sufficient reason that the masters never part with them till they are found incorrigible. These, however, are mostly Bozals, or wild serviles newly driven from the interior, and they are not numerous, the transactions of the year being now concluded. The dealers smiled at us, and were in good humour.

It would be easy to adorn this subject with many a flower of description; the atrocities of the capture, the brutalities of the purchase, the terrors of the middle-passage, and the horrors to which the wretches are exposed when entering half-civilized lands. It was usual to throw the slaves overboard when the fatal symptom, coprophagism, appeared amongst them. A single Dau (Dow) belonging to the late Prince Khalid lost when running a course 500 slaves by sickness, and by the falling of the pont-flottant or flying-deck—many a desperate naval action could not show such a butcher’s bill. A certain Charles L———, a kiln-dried Mauritius man, crucified seven negroes in terrorem: two were fastened outside the ship, the others were nailed by the feet to the deck, and by the hands to capstan bars, lashed across the masts. With a lighted tar-barrel in an empty boat he nearly caused the loss of an English cruiser, and when she was well on the reef he let off rockets and saluted her. Another man, a Spaniard, finding his ventures likely to die of dysentery, sewed them up before he sent them to the bazar; this slaver made an act of contrition before he died, and severely blamed his bowie-knife. Sensational paragraphs, however, are not wanted by those to whom the subject is familiar, and they are likely to mislead the many who are not. I shall return to the subject of slavery in another chapter.

Thence we entered the Malagash Quarter, where the land belongs chiefly to Sayyid Sulayman bin Hamed, a former Governor of Zanzibar; he is said to be so wealthy that he ignores the extent of his means. Here is the Lal Bazar, the very centre of prostitution, an Agapemone of some twenty Cyprians: all are Wasawahili—the Indian women, who appear almost European in complexion and features, having now left. Their faces like skinned apes, and lean legs encased in red silk tights, make their appearance revolting as their society is dangerous. Some of them cool the orbits of the eyes by a kind of loup of perfumed turmeric, whose golden tint causes the outer darkness to gloom extra sooty; others apply curry-coloured dabs to the woolly hair. Sundry of these patches are frontlets or medicines applied to the temples. In former days we used, for instance, ‘rose-water and vinegar, with a little woman’s milk, and nutmegs grated upon a rose cake,’ and the Jews are said to have smeared themselves with Christian blood.

The Malagash Quarter is at the far east of the city, leading to two tumble-down bridges which span a lagoon more deadly than that of British Accra. These ruins might easily be converted into dykes, and in process of time the mouth would be sanded or silted up; they are however, fated to make way for iron improvements. In my day the lagoon was connected by fresh water with the sea, and became now a muddy pool at the ebb tides of the Syzygies, then a sheet of festering mud which nearly encircled the settlement, and which converted the site of Zanzibar city into a quasi-island. Every evening a pestilent sepulchral miasma arose from it, covering the skin with a clammy sweat, and exhaling a fetor which caused candles to burn dim, and which changed the sound of the human voice. Lazy skippers anchoring here for facility of watering, thus exposing their men to the breath of the fetid lagoon, have lost in a few days half the crew; and although the water appeared to be of the purest, it became so offensive that often the casks had to be started.

We then passed over a sandy flat, thinly powdered with black vegetable humus. To the left was a creek upon whose sandy beach vessels are hauled up, and where ships of 300 to 400 tons can be safely careened: in a few years there will here be a dock. A mile of neat footpath placed us at the late Sayyid’s Summer Palace, Mto-ni, which is distant about three direct miles from the Consulate. After escaping the unpleasant attentions bestowed upon us by the tame ostriches, who are apt to use beak and wing, we dismounted for inspection. The building is of coral rag, pierced with square windows, and the wings are united by a verandah-terrace, supported by wooden pillars, and facing Meccah, for convenience of prayer. A few feet above the centre is the peaked roof of the Kiosk, which makes the place remarkable to crews entering the harbour. In front floats from sunrise to sunset the red flag of the Sayyid: the rear is brought up by a small cemetery, sundry offices, and lowly cajan-thatched hovels tenanted by slaves. The work of man is mean enough, but it is surrounded by the noblest handiwork of Nature, cocoas and mangoes, whilst the borders of the little stream could be beautifully laid out.

Gum Copal, formerly called in the trade Gum Anime, now Gum Elemi, is washed down by the rains, and is picked up by the slaves about the debouchure of this fiumara. On the Mto-ni road also we passed sundry places where pits, never exceeding five feet deep, had been sunk in the sandy plain, thinly clothed with sedgy grass. Upon the higher grounds, also, to judge by the eye, about 100 feet above sea-level, we found many deserted diggings. The soil is a dark vegetable mould, varying in thickness from a foot to 18 inches, and based upon the raised sea-beach of blue clay. This becomes fat and adhesive, clogging the hoe as it descends: the half-decayed blood-red fibre with which it is mixed throughout was recognized by the negroes as cocoa-roots. Bits of scarlet-coloured earth also variegated the faint blue marl, and at a depth of 2-1/2 feet water began to exude from the greasy walls of the pit. These places supply only the raw or unripe copal, locally called Chakazi,[[95]] and by us corrupted to Jackass: the true vegetable fossil must be brought from the coast. The tree was probably once common on the Island, but it has been cut down for masts and similar uses. Copal does not appear under that name in the list of exports from Zanzibar given by Captain Smee in 1811: possibly that officer alludes to it when speaking of ‘Dammer.’ In early days ‘gum-anime’ was held a precious medicine for rheums and heaviness of the head. It was imported viâ the Levant ‘from the place where incense is found, and that lande or soyle is called Animitim, and therefore the thing is called, Anime,’ says Dr Monardes, treating of the objects that are brought from the West Indies. He adds that American Anime was whiter, brighter, and said to be a ‘spice of Charabe or Succino, which is called amber congealed.’ In 1769 Portugal forbade the importation of true copal, in order to protect the Jataycica or gum of the Jatoba (hymenæa), of which 14 Arrobas had been sent from Turiassu in the Brazil.

Leaving Mto-ni, after half a mile of beach, we turned towards the interior, and ascended the gently rising ground, beautifully undulated, which leads to the royal estates called Rauzah and Taif, formerly Kizimba-ni or Sebbe. For two or three miles a narrow path, which compelled us to ride in Indian file, wound through cocoa-groves and patches of highly-cultivated ground, with here and there a hut buried under fruit-laden mangos. The track, then 254 feet above sea-level, widened into a broad avenue of dark conical clove-trees, varying in height from 6 to 16 feet according to age; feathered almost to the ground, and extending, like the well-berried coffee-shrub, its branches at right angles to the trunk. All, however, bore the impress of neglect, where Dr Ruschenberger found a ‘picture of industry and of admirable neatness and beauty’ that employed from 500 to 700 slaves.

We saw little to admire in the ‘palace,’ a single-storied lodge of coral rag, and ample porches looking upon sundry courts and yards, negro quarters and drying-grounds. There is here a well said to be 100 fathoms deep, which gives water only in the rainy seasons; most of the upland plantations must draw the element from the little streams. The Arab care-takers, after refreshing us with cocoa-nut milk, led us out to inspect the grounds. These Semites, satiated with verdure, despise the idea of assisting nature, and yet at Maskat they will gaze delighted upon a dusty, ragged plot of sand-veiled rock, dotted with consumptive trees, and dignified by the name of a garden. Some years ago Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton taught the late Sayyid to plant rose-trees, which gave a crop as abundant as those of ancient Syria: during their owners’ absence the slaves uprooted the young growth in very wantonness. The nutmeg fared as badly. The Consul also succeeded in producing wall-flowers, lavender, and the apple-scented as well as the common geranium: imported from Europe with abundant trouble, they met the fate of all the roses. The Ravenala, or Travellers’ tree, was brought from the Seychelles by the Sayyid with the same unsuccess. Several kinds of jasmines were transported from Cutch to Zanzibar: the Arabs objected to them, that the scent depresses the male sex and unduly excites the feminine. Many flowers—for instance, the Narcissus and certain Acacias—labour under the same ill-fame.

Here, after admiring the delicious view of the tree-crowned uplands, the low grounds buried in the richest forest, the cocoa-fringed shore of purest white, and the sea blue as a slab of lapis lazuli, we had an opportunity of inspecting the celebrated clove plantations of Zanzibar. According to Castanheda, when Vasco da Gama first touched at Mombasah and Melinde, their Reguli sent him, amongst other presents, cloves, and declared that their countries grew the spice. Other travellers mention the clove being found at various parts of East Africa, and Andrea Corsali in Ramusio describes the produce as ‘not like those of India, but shaped more like our acorns.’ The Dutch, however, since their conquest of the Moluccas or Spice Islands in 1607, monopolized the clove like the nutmeg; and by destroying the former and enslaving the cultivators, they confined it, lest the price should fall, to the single Island of Amboyna. The naturalist traveller, M. Poivre, when governor of the Isle of France, brought from the least frequented of the Moluccas, in June 27, 1770, some 450 nutmeg stalks and 10,000 nutmegs in blossom or about to blossom, together with 70 clove trees and a box of plants, many of them well above the earth. In 1772 a further supply was procured; the greater part was kept in the Isle of France, the rest were dispersed amongst the Seychelles, Bourbon, and Cayenne. All the specimens given to private individuals died: skilful botanists, however, succeeded in preserving 58 nutmegs and 38 clove trees. Of the latter two bore blossoms in 1775, and the fruit was gathered in the following year; the produce, however, was small, light, and dry, and all deemed that the Dutch had been unnecessarily alarmed.[[96]] The project, however, proved completely successful.