By Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton’s advice, I ventured to modify the scheme of the East African Expedition, as originally proposed by the Expeditionary Committee of the Royal Geographical Society of London. In 1855, M. Erhardt, an energetic member of the hapless “Mombas Mission,” had on his return to London offered to explore a vast mass of water, about the size of the Caspian, which, from the information of divers “natives,” he had deposited in slug or leech shape in the heart of Intertropical Africa, thus prolonging the old “Maravi,” or “Moravim Lake” of Portuguese travellers and school atlases, to the north of the equator, and thus bringing a second deluge upon sundry provinces and kingdoms thoroughly well known for the last half century. He had proposed to land, with an outfit of 300 dollars[1], at Kilwa, one of the southern ports of the Zanzibar mainland, to hire a score of Wasawahili porters, to march with a caravan upon the nearest point of his own water, and to launch an adventurous canoe upon a lake which, according to his map, could not be traversed under twenty-five days. Messrs. Erhardt and Krapf, of the “Mombas Mission,” spent, it is true, a few hours at Kilwa, where they were civilly entreated by the governor and the citizens; but they egregiously deceived themselves and others, when they concluded that they could make that place their ingress-point. Lieut. Christopher, I.N., who visited the East African coast in 1843, wisely advised explorers to avoid the neighbourhood of Kilwa. Wisely, I repeat: the burghers of that proud old settlement had, only a year before my arrival, murdered, by means of the Wangindo savages, an Arab merchant who ventured to lay open the interior.