How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. LivingstoneStanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
History
How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone
Stanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Livingstone, David, 1813-1873
Within the city, negro carriers may be heard at all hours, in couples,
engaged in the transportation of clove-bags, boxes of merchandise, &c.,
from store to "godown" and from "go-down" to the beach, singing a kind
of monotone chant for the encouragement of each other, and for the
guiding of their pace as they shuffle through the streets with
bare feet. You may recognise these men readily, before long, as old
acquaintances, by the consistency with which they sing the tunes they
have adopted. Several times during a day have I heard the same couple
pass beneath the windows of the Consulate, delivering themselves of
the same invariable tune and words. Some might possibly deem the songs
foolish and silly, but they had a certain attraction for me, and I
considered that they were as useful as anything else for the purposes
they were intended.
The town of Zanzibar, situate on the south-western shore of the island,
contains a population of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants; that
of the island altogether I would estimate at not more than two hundred
thousand inhabitants, including all races.
The greatest number of foreign vessels trading with this port are
American, principally from New York and Salem. After the American come
the German, then come the French and English. They arrive loaded with
American sheeting, brandy, gunpowder, muskets, beads, English cottons,
brass-wire, china-ware, and other notions, and depart with ivory,
gum-copal, cloves, hides, cowries, sesamum, pepper, and cocoa-nut oil.
The value of the exports from this port is estimated at $3,000,000, and
the imports from all countries at $3,500,000.
The Europeans and Americans residing in the town of Zanzibar are either
Government officials, independent merchants, or agents for a few great
mercantile houses in Europe and America.
The climate of Zanzibar is not the most agreeable in the world. I have
heard Americans and Europeans condemn it most heartily. I have also seen
nearly one-half of the white colony laid up in one day from sickness. A
noxious malaria is exhaled from the shallow inlet of Malagash, and the
undrained filth, the garbage, offal, dead mollusks, dead pariah dogs,
dead cats, all species of carrion, remains of men and beasts unburied,
assist to make Zanzibar a most unhealthy city; and considering that it
it ought to be most healthy, nature having pointed out to man the means,
and having assisted him so far, it is most wonderful that the ruling
prince does not obey the dictates of reason.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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