Chapter 10

"He was such a nice little kiddie," they said, apologetically, as though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.

"I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years," said the lieutenant, genially. "But fancy your knowing Sparks! He has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's where we hit it off--we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down here. I know Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred miles."

I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a "disgusting practice," and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.

"Yes," he said; "and what's worse is that we're here for two years more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China. Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old, and the steamer stops once every month."

Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side, so we had time in which to give the exiles the news of the outside world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy; how another had sold "ready to wear" clothes in a New York department store, and another had been attaché at Madrid, and another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.

But at last the ship's whistle blew with raucous persistence. It was final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages, of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the _Kanzlar_ became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon line.

I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall never meet them again--we had just burned signals as our ships passed in the night--and yet, I must always consider among the friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi, "the only respectable members of Chinde Society."[A]

[Footnote A: NOTE--I did not lose the white-clad youths. The lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also, should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society. He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the _Kanzlar_, alone prevented his social position being publicly recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society. R.H.D.]

The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of honor.

Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison and all the inhabitants as well. To-day the slave-trade brings to those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain, and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day, which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs. The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the city, and with the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.

I have never visited a city which so impressed one with the fact that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is, on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers," and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery, when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves bought and sold.

In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of East Africa from south of Lorenço Marquez to north of Mozambique, and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he keeps those who would improve both from gaining any hold or influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side. They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his café at the coast and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them no protection.

The land back of Mozambique is divided into "holdings," and the rent of each holding is based upon the number of native huts it contains. The tax per hut is one pound a year, and these holdings are leased to any Portuguese who promises to pay the combined taxes of all the huts. He also engages to cut new roads, to keep those already made in repair, and to furnish a sufficient number of police to maintain order. The lessees of these holdings have given rise to many and terrible scandals. In the majority of cases, the lessee, once out of reach of all authority and of public opinion, and wielding the power of life and death, becomes a tyrant and task-master over his district, taxing the natives to five and ten times the amount which each is supposed to furnish, and treating them virtually as his bondsmen. Up along the Shire River, the lessees punish the blacks by hanging them from a tree by their ankles and beating their bare backs with rhinoceros hide, until, as it has been described to me by a reputable English resident, the blood runs in a stream over the negro's shoulders, and forms a pool beneath his eyes.

You hear of no legitimate enterprise fostered by these lessees, of no development of natural resources, but, instead, you are told tales of sickening cruelty, and you can read in the consular reports others quite as true; records of heartless treatment of natives, of neglect of great resources, and of hurried snatching at the year's crop and a return to the Coast, with nothing to show of sustained effort or steady development. The incompetence of Portugal cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the Boer, she will find the seaport of Lorenço Marquez too necessary to her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she will withdraw from it, in favor of those who are fitter to survive her.

There is no more interesting contrast along the coast of East Africa than that presented by the colonies of England, Germany, and Portugal. Of these three, the colonies of the Englishmen are, as one expects to find them, the healthiest, the busiest, and the most prosperous. They thrive under your very eyes; you feel that they were established where they are, not by accident, not to gratify a national vanity or a ruler's ambition, but with foresight and with knowledge, and with the determination to make money; and that they will increase and flourish because they are situated where the natives and settlers have something to sell, and where the men can bring, in return, something the natives and colonials wish to buy. Port Elizabeth, Durban, East London, and Zanzibar belong to this prosperous class, which gives good reason for the faith of those who founded them.

On the other hand, as opposed to these, there are the settlements of the Portuguese, rotten and corrupt, and the German settlements of Dar Es Salaam and Tanga which have still to prove their right to exist. Outwardly, to the eye, they are model settlements. Dar Es Salaam, in particular, is a beautiful and perfectly appointed colonial town. In the care in which it is laid out, in the excellence of its sanitary arrangements, in its cleanliness, and in the magnificence of its innumerable official residences, and in their sensible adaptability to the needs of the climate, one might be deceived into believing that Dar Es Salaam is the beautiful gateway of a thriving and busy colony. But there are no ramparts of merchandise along her wharves, no bulwarks of strangely scented bales blocking her water-front; no lighters push hurriedly from the shore to meet the ship, although she is a German ship, or to receive her cargo of articles "made in Germany." On the contrary, her freight is unloaded at the English ports, and taken on at English ports. And the German traders who send their merchandise to Hamburg in her hold come over the side at Zanzibar, at Durban, and at Aden, where the English merchants find in them fierce competitors. There is nothing which goes so far to prove the falsity of the saying that "trade follows the flag" as do these model German colonies with their barracks, governor's palace, officers' clubs, public pleasure parks, and with no trade; and the English colonies, where the German merchants remain, and where, under the English flag, they grow steadily rich. The German Emperor, believing that colonies are a source of strength to an empire, rather than the weakness that they are, has raised the German flag in Central East Africa, but the ships of the German East African Company, subsidized by him, carry their merchandize to the English ports, and his German subjects remain where they can make the most money. They do not move to those ports where the flag of their country would wave over them.

Dar Es Salaam, although it lacks the one thing needful to make it a model settlement, possesses all the other things which are needful, and many which are pure luxuries. Its residences, as I have said, have been built after the most approved scientific principles of ventilation and sanitation. In no tropical country have I seen buildings so admirably adapted to the heat and climatic changes and at the same time more in keeping with the surrounding scenery. They are handsome, cool-looking, white and clean, with broad verandas, high walls, and false roofs under which currents of air are lured in spite of themselves. The residences are set back along the high bank which faces the bay. In front of them is a public promenade, newly planted shade-trees arch over it, and royal palms reach up to it from the very waters of the harbor. At one end of this semicircle are the barracks of the Soudanese soldiers, and at the other is the official palace of the governor. Everything in the settlement is new, and everything is built on the scale of a city, and with the idea of accommodating a great number of people. Hotels and cafés, better than any one finds in the older settlements along the coast, are arranged on the water-front, and there is a church capable of seating the entire white population at one time. If the place is to grow, it can do so only through trade, and when trade really comes all these palaces and cafés and barracks which occupy the entire water-front will have to be pushed back to make way for warehouses and custom-house sheds. At present it is populated only by officials, and, I believe, twelve white women.

You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at a world's fair as an example of a model village.

In writing of Zanzibar I am embarrassed by the knowledge that I am not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.

Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty fortress-like façade before you, and a strip of white sand is at your feet.

And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak, and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.

In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous, unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework, windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue, and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him; the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts, and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.

The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.

Zanzibar is an "Arabian Nights" city, a comic-opera capital, a most difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.