Part 5

We steam onwards, and across the Equator, passing by the coastline of Italian Somaliland and British East Africa, to where, nearly two thousand miles from Aden, and close in to the mainland, are two other islands coloured red on the map, Pemba and Zanzibar. We are a long way off our course to India, yet Zanzibar and the narrow strip of coast behind it belong by history and development to India and Arabia rather than to the neighbouring continent.

The Portuguese, on the way to India, creeping along the coast in their old-fashioned vessels, found here Arab traders and Arab cities with an active intercourse across the Indian Ocean. The periodic Monsoon winds brought the fleets of dhows, with the produce of India and the Persian Gulf, and carried them back with their cargoes of ivory and slaves. The Portuguese occupied the African coast region as part of their Indian Empire; the English and Dutch, at a later time, made straight across the ocean from the Cape or Mauritius and left the Portuguese undisturbed. So, when the rule of Portugal collapsed through its own weakness, the old conditions were restored.

For a long time Zanzibar and the neighbouring coasts were ruled by local chiefs, nominally dependent on the Iman of Muscat in southeastern Arabia; until, early in the nineteenth century, Seyyid Said transferred his court from Muscat to Zanzibar and extended his power over all the neighbouring coast. On his death, in the middle of the century, Zanzibar, largely through the influence of the Viceroy of India, was separated politically from Muscat. It remains to-day in name an independent kingdom, though stripped of its dominions on the mainland and under the Protection of Britain. We became concerned with this region, in the nineteenth century, mainly owing to our efforts to suppress the slave trade of which it was the chief centre. We found it impossible to carry out our policy without some effective control over the native states, and our paramount interests in Zanzibar and the mainland to the north have been recognized in our agreements with France and Germany. To-day the palace of 29 the Sultan still remains, but on the site of the old slave-market stands the Cathedral as a sign of the success of our efforts. 30

The island of Zanzibar is long and narrow; it measures about fifty miles from north to south, and only twenty-five at its widest in the middle. It is nearly three times the size of the Isle of Man. A long ridge of hills divides it into two distinct parts. The east is largely made up of old coral rock, with a very thin layer of soil; it is not very fertile and is, moreover, exposed to the full force of the Trade winds. Most of the population is on the more sheltered western side, and here are the town and harbour of Zanzibar. The ruling class and original landowners are Arabs; but the mass of the people are Swahili, of mixed African and Asiatic descent, and freed slaves, largely 31 natives of Africa. Here is a typical group of natives. The chief wealth of the island lies in the cultivation of cloves, as a large portion of the world’s crop is grown here; but there are also the coconut palm, the rubber vine and many other tropical plants. A great and interesting change is taking place in the ownership of the plantations: the natives of India, shopkeepers, traders and moneylenders, are steadily ousting the Arabs. The Arab has lost much of his wealth, through the emancipation of his slaves, and is slow to adapt himself to the new conditions; so that the thrifty Indian bids fair to annex the whole island in the near future, and Zanzibar will renew its connexion with the mainland on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

Apart from its agriculture, the chief value of the island is in the sheltered roadstead of the capital, as good harbours are 32 rare in this part of the world. Here we see it from the sea, 33 and here is one of the main streets of the town. In Zanzibar we find all the races of the Indian Ocean represented, and here are collected all the products of the islands and of the coast of Africa, which is only twenty-five miles away. The trade with India still remains, while the steamship has brought also direct intercourse with Europe. In the early days of trade, the security of a position on an island was an important factor in the growth of a seaport; now that Europe is policing both the sea and the mainland, the advantage of the island is less, and Zanzibar has a growing rival a hundred and fifty miles away on the coast of Africa. Mombasa is on a small island, connected with the 34 mainland by a causeway. On the north side is Mombasa harbour, 35 rather shallow and not very convenient for shipping; on the south is the deep Kilindini channel, running for a long distance inland and providing one of the finest harbours on the east coast of Africa. Mombasa is the terminus of the railway which crosses the low coast strip and surmounts the plateau of East Africa. The trade of the port is very old; but only slaves and ivory could be carried in former times over the long and difficult caravan route which ended here. Now, the railway can bring down to the sea all the products of a vast area inland. Here we have a 36 scene on the old road, and here by way of contrast the modern 37 railway. Mombasa, like Port Sudan, will create a new traffic in the future, to join the great stream which moves through the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal; but the subject of British East Africa and its resources must be left for future treatment; here we are concerned only with its relation to our sea route.

Before we turn towards India we have yet another island to visit, an island connected not with the new, but with the old route to the East. This is Mauritius, lying east of Madagascar and well out in the Indian Ocean, about two thousand four hundred miles from Aden and rather less from Ceylon. We shall find it very different from Zanzibar. A French patois is the language commonly spoken; most of the names on the map are French, and the statue of a great Frenchman is one of the first things 38 which we notice on landing at Port Louis. Mauritius was in effect a purely French colony, when it became ours by conquest just a century ago; but the immigration from India is now modifying rapidly the French character of the island.

Before the French were the Dutch: they settled first in the southeast corner, as Grand Port was the last convenient point of call on the way from the Cape to Ceylon, before the long voyage across the open ocean. After a century of partial occupation, the Dutch retired in 1712, leaving behind them the name Mauritius, taken from that of Count Maurice of Nassau, the Stadtholder of Holland. The French, who were already in Madagascar and the neighbouring island of Bourbon, promptly occupied Mauritius, re-naming it Île de France. It was controlled by the French East-India Company and became in a few years very prosperous under the administration of Mahé de Labourdonnais. His name still survives in Mahébourg, and we have already seen his statue in Port Louis. During our war with France at the end of the century, Mauritius, owing to its position on the only route to India, was used as a base for attacking our commerce by the French privateers who swarmed in these seas; so that its capture became necessary for the security of our Indian possessions. Both Bourbon and Mauritius were taken, but the former was restored to France by the peace of 1814.

The island as we found it was a true French plantation-colony. The ruling classes were the Creole landowners, French by descent; while the actual work of the plantations was carried on by slaves imported from Africa. It is still thoroughly French, and the plantation system survives in a modified form as the sole support of the people; but the former importance of the island as a commercial and strategic centre has greatly declined with the opening of the Suez Canal. Mauritius is no longer on a great trade route, but it is well worth a visit in itself and is still closely connected with our final destination, India.

We must first make a brief survey with the map. The island 39 is in the form of a rough oval, a little over thirty miles long, less than half the size of the county of Kent. Its coasts are fringed with coral reefs, broken here and there by gaps, especially where the streams of fresh water enter the sea. Behind these gaps are the seaports, of which only two are of any size, Grand Port or Mahébourg at the southeast corner, and Port Louis, the capital, in the northwest. Grand Port was occupied first, but it is open to the Southeast Trades; so that Port 40 Louis, like Zanzibar, on the sheltered side, and with a good harbour, has become the chief port for the whole island. In the north and part of the east and the southeast corner the land lies fairly low; here we find the chief towns, the plantations and most of the population. A great deal of the centre and south is filled up with hills and plateaux; some of the peaks rising to over two thousand feet. Here are the Moka Mountains, behind 41 Port Louis, steep and rugged, crowned by a strange peak, 42 Pieterboth Head, which is a useful landmark for sailors. Notice the Dutch name. In the southwest the hills are very near to the sea; the coast plain is narrow, the slopes are steep and the rivers come down in rapids and falls amidst wild and beautiful scenery. Here is the Chamarel fall and here again are the falls 43 on the Savanne River. The railways are a fair guide to the 44 structure of the country, as they keep for the most part to the lowland or the river valleys, except where the main line from Port Louis to Mahébourg is forced to surmount the middle of the plateau; while the Moka branch crosses a steep ridge on its way to the lower country to the east. Here we see one of the curious trains crossing one of the mountain streams at the foot 45 of the bare hill slopes; the picture gives a good idea of the scenery on the railway.

The rainfall in Mauritius is heavy in the summer months, December to March, especially on the east side of the hills, where the wind comes straight in from the warm ocean; and the temperature is high, at sea level, as Mauritius lies on the edge of the Tropics. Heat and rain, together with a rich volcanic soil, have made Mauritius what it is to-day. Agriculture is the only occupation of the people, and the only important crop is the sugar-cane. This was first introduced from the East India Islands by the Dutch, though little progress was made with its cultivation until the time of the French settlement. The forest which then covered the island was cleared away, and the cultivation of the cane, by means of slave labour on large plantations, became the staple industry of the new colonists. Large fortunes were made in the early part of the nineteenth century, but Mauritius, like the West Indies, has suffered greatly from the competition of beet-sugar, and its trade has declined greatly, though it has still a good market in India. Too much dependence on a single product has brought ruin on many of the planters. Here is a picture of one of these large sugar 46 estates. In front of us we see the cane growing and the planter looking over his crops; the ugly building, with the chimney, which spoils the middle of the picture, is the mill where the cane is crushed to extract the juice.

The cultivation of sugar in Mauritius, like that of tea in Ceylon, has produced remarkable changes in the character of the people. When slavery was abolished, in 1835, new sources of labour for the plantations had to be found, and Indian coolies were imported on a large scale. These usually remained when the term of their contract was over; with the result that at the present time about three-quarters of the total population of the island is of Indian descent, the majority having been born in the island. We find them everywhere in the island, living 47 contentedly in primitive huts and cultivating their small patches of land. They are steadily acquiring the land in small plots and manage to exist comfortably even under present conditions. In short, Mauritius is becoming more and more an offshoot of India, since not only the labour but much of the food supply must come from the rice fields of India, so long as nearly all the land under cultivation is given up to a single crop like sugar. The climate, too, is more suitable to the brown than to the white people; malarial fever is always present, and the general conditions have not been improved by the cutting down of the greater part of the forest. Sometimes the weather brings disaster in a swift and sudden form, as Mauritius lies in the track of the cyclones which whirl in from the northeast, especially in March and April, and travel southwards towards Madagascar. In a few hours one of these terrible storms can destroy houses and plantations and undo the work of years. One of the worst of these, in recent years, struck the island in 1892; and here we see some of the damage done at Port Louis. The planter in 48 this beautiful island has truly many difficulties to contend with. It is possible that the growth of trade in Madagascar and on the neighbouring coasts of Africa may bring back a little of its past prosperity to Port Louis; but Mauritius can never regain the position which it enjoyed before the piercing of the Suez Canal.

If we look at the map showing the depths of the Indian Ocean, (28) we notice that Mauritius, with the sister French island of Réunion, rests on a relatively shallow bank, raised above the ocean floor. Following this bank northwards for nearly a thousand miles, we come to a whole group of little islands which are connected by a similar bank with Madagascar. The most northerly of this group are the Seychelles. Another great bank runs southward from India with scores of islets on it. In the north are the Laccadives, close to the coast of India; in the middle are the Maldives; and in the far south, beyond the Equator, right out in the ocean, is the little Chagos Archipelago, including the coral island of Diego Garcia, where at one time there was a small coaling station used by vessels bound to Australia. All these islands are but the fragments of a sunken land-mass which at a very early period of the worlds history joined South Africa to India. They are widely separated if we look only at the surface of the sea, but really joined together if we look below.

Mahé, the largest of the Seychelles, has an area of rather over fifty square miles, a little more than that of the island of Jersey; we could walk from end to end of it in a few hours. A map, showing Zanzibar, Pemba, Mauritius and the Seychelles 49 on the same scale, may perhaps help us to realize their relative size and shape. There is one good harbour in Mahé, on which stands Victoria, the capital, where steamers sometimes call on the voyage from Aden to Mauritius or from India to Mombasa. 50 Here is a general view of the harbour and here is a street 51 in the little town. The whole group was dependent on Mauritius and was given up to us at the same time as that island. The language of the people is still modified French. The Seychelles are fertile and beautiful and not unhealthy, in spite of their nearness to the Equator. They naturally abound in tropical plants, among which the coconut palm is the most valuable to the natives. Here are some of these palms with 52 the mill where the oil is extracted from the nut. Here also 53 we see a species of fan palm, which has a strange history. Centuries ago, the Portuguese found washed up in the Maldives and on the southwest coasts of India a curious double nut, the _coco-de-mer_. The tree which produced the nut was unknown 54 and could not be discovered in the neighbouring islands, so the fable was invented that it grew in the depths of the sea. The nut was much valued in India as a medicine, but in spite of careful search not until the end of the eighteenth century was the parent tree found in the Seychelles, where alone it grows. The Southwest Monsoon, blowing for months at a time, carried the nut all the way to India, just as it brought the fleets of Arab dhows from the coast of Africa. So we have in this tale of the nut a useful reminder of the climate of the Indian Ocean. We will now leave the Seychelles after a glance at another strange product of a neighbouring island, Aldabra. This is the giant tortoise. It 55 was at one time very common in this part of the Indian Ocean, as we learn from the accounts of early voyagers, but it is now rare.

Mauritius and the Seychelles, with many of the smaller groups and islands in the Indian Ocean, came into our hands in connexion with the development of the old route to India by way of the Cape. There is one group, among the nearest to India, which through all the changes of Portuguese, Dutch and British occupation has succeeded in maintaining a partial independence. The northernmost of the Maldive islands are only about four hundred miles from the coast of Ceylon, within easy reach not only of the road from Africa and the Seychelles to India, but also of the more important road from Arabia, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to the Malay Archipelago and the Far East. The language of the people, as we might expect from the near neighbourhood of Ceylon, is closely akin to old-fashioned Sinhalese. We may perhaps regard the people as colonists from Ceylon, with a large mixed element due to the Arab traders who must have visited the islands often in their voyages. The Maldives have always followed the fortunes of Ceylon; they have recognized in turn Portuguese, Dutch and British authority, but have succeeded in avoiding complete annexation. This may be due partly to the fact that there is little in them to attract invaders. The islands which make up the group are mere coral atolls, with no good harbours, a very small supply of good water, and few products for trade. The Maldive trading fleet, which 56 we see here, does not suggest a very heavy traffic. What there is, mostly dried fish, finds its only market in Ceylon, which sends, among other things, fresh drinking water in return. 57 The Sultan is on good terms with our officials: here we see him, with his suite, visiting a British warship, and here he is 58 receiving the return call of the representative of the Governor of Ceylon. The connexion with Ceylon is formally recognized once a year, when a solemn embassy comes from Malé, the chief island of the group, to Colombo, to greet the representative of the Suzerain Power. So we conclude with this embassy, which has 59 finally landed us in Ceylon.

In our voyage from the Gulf of Aden to Colombo we have made a great circuit of the Indian Ocean, yet from beginning to end we have never lost touch with Indian trade and Indian people. The islands and ports which we have visited are only to be understood as parts of a larger whole, united not divided by the sea. We speak rightly of the Indian Ocean, since India is and always has been the central fact in the life of this region, both politically and economically. This was as true in the earliest days of the Arab traders as it is to-day. We have replaced sails by steam, cut the Suez Canal, and changed the direction of the main ocean route; but as soon as we pass the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, we find that our route is only one of many. We are in a network of traffic and intercourse which was in existence centuries ago, long before the first European keel broke into the eastern seas.

LECTURE IV

CEYLON

Ceylon, which takes the first place among our Crown Colonies, is the halfway house on our long journey. As we steam towards Colombo there is little to suggest that we are nearing one of the chief harbours in the eastern world. We see a long unbroken line of coast, fringed with green coconut palms, with no trace of bay or inlet. In the background rises an irregular hill mass, topped with long ridges and sharp peaks. Presently we can 1 distinguish two great breakwaters, with a wide opening between. The southwest wind is blowing and huge waves are dashing over them, throwing up masses of foam as high as the masts of the vessels which lie inside in a great basin, calm as a lake, a mile and a half long and over half a mile wide. Here is a safe anchorage for a fleet, with coaling jetties and a dry dock 2 which can take the largest vessel afloat.

Like so many modern seaports Colombo owes everything to engineering. Forty years ago the roadstead was open to the swell from the southwest, except for the shelter of the little headland from which the main breakwater now juts out. In those days our vessel would have called at Galle, a hundred miles away at the southern corner of the island. We can journey to Galle now by railway along the coast, through interminable groves of coconut 3 palms, with glimpses of the sea breaking on the coral reefs on our right and Adam’s peak rising into the clouds on our left. Galle was in early times the chief port of the island, the meeting point of Arab traders from the west and Chinese from the east; it is a picturesque, old-world town, with many relics of the Dutch occupation; but Colombo has now taken its place as the commercial centre. Here is a view of the Galle 4 lighthouse, taken from the walls of the old Dutch fortifications; the building behind the palms is a new Mohammedan mosque. In a quiet corner we see native fishing boats, with more palms in 5 the background. Here again is a Hindu temple, dating from the 6 time of the Dutch occupation; the lions over the gate may perhaps have been copied from some European coat-of-arms, as they look rather different from the usual native devices.

Far away in the northeast is Trincomali, a vast landlocked 7 bay, with unlimited deep and safe anchorage, the only good natural harbour in the island, in fact one of the best natural harbours in the whole world. Here was for many years the headquarters of the Navy in Indian waters; but it is out of the track of steamers and away from the capital, so that it has now been dismantled by the Admiralty. The Navy has followed to Colombo the commerce which depends on it for protection, and Trincomali, in spite of its great natural advantages, has sunk back to the position of a third-rate local port.