At noon, on the 16th of June, 1857, the corvette Artémise, after the usual expenditure of gunpowder which must in Eastern lands announce every momentous event, from the birth of a prince to the departure of a bishop, slowly gliding out of Zanzibar harbour, afforded us a farewell glance at the whitewashed mosques and houses of the Arabs, the cadjan-huts, the cocoa-grown coasts, and the ruddy hills striped with long lines of clove. Onwards she stole before a freshening breeze, the balmy breath of the Indian Ocean, under a sun that poured a flood of sparkling light over the azure depths and the bright green shallows around, between the “elfin isles” of Kumbeni, with its tall trees, and Chumbi, tufted with dense thickets, till the white sandstrip mingled with the blue ocean, the gleaming line of dwarf red cliff and scaur dropped into the water’s edge, the land faded from emerald to brown, and from brown to hazy purple, the tufts of the trees seemed first to stand out of, then to swim upon, the wave, and as evening, the serenest of tropical evenings, closed in over sky, earth, and sea, a cloud-like ridge, dimly discernible from our quarter, was all that remained of Zanzibar. I will not here stay the course of my narrative to inform the reader that Zanzibar is not, as the Cyclopædias declare, “an island of Africa, governed by a king who is subject to the Portuguese;” that it is not, as the Indian post-offices appear to believe, a part of the Persian Gulf; nor, as homekeeping folk, whose notions of African geography are somewhat dim and ill-defined, have mentally determined, a rock in the Red Sea, nor a dependency of the Niger, nor even an offshoot of the Cape of Storms.