If we travellers in transit had reason to be proud of our countryman’s influence at Zanzibar, the resident foreigners should have been truly thankful for it. When Lieut-Colonel Hamerton first made this Island his head-quarters (1841), he found that for nine years it had not been visited by a British cruiser, and that interested reports had been spread, representing us to be no longer masters of the Indian Seas. Slavery was everywhere rampant. Bozals, green or wild slaves, here called Baghams (بغم), were thrown overboard when sick, to avoid paying duty; and the sea-beach of the city, which acts Marine Parade, as well as the plantations, presented horrible spectacles of dogs and birds of prey devouring swollen and spotted human carcases—the remnants of ‘slaves that never prayed.’[125] The Consul’s representations were listened to by Sayyid Said, who, through virtue of certain dry floggings and confiscations of property, à la Mohammed Ali, instilled into the slave-owners some semblance of humanity. Negro insolence was dealt with as summarily. The Arabs had persuaded the Wasawahili, and even the Creoles, that a white man is a being below contempt, and the ‘poor African’ eagerly carried out the theory. Only 17 years have elapsed (1857) since a certain trading-consul, Mr W—, in consular hat and sword, was horsed upon a servile back, and was solemnly ‘bakur’d,’ in his own consular house, under his own consular flag. This occurrence was afterwards denied by the best of all authorities, the gentleman who told the tale: I have, however, every reason to believe it. A Msawahili would at any time enter the merchant’s office, dispose his sandaled or bare feet upon the table or the bureau, call for cognac, and, if refused, draw his dagger. Impudent fishermen would anchor their craft below the windows of the British Consulate, and, clinging to the mast-top, enjoy with derision the spectacle of feeding Kafirs. The Arabs jostled strangers in the streets, drove them from the centre, and compelled them to pass by the wall. At night no one dared to carry a lantern, which would inevitably have been knocked out of his hand; and a promenade in the dark usually caused insults, sometimes a bastinado. To such a pitch rose contempt for the ‘Faranj,’ that even the ‘mild Hindus,’—our ‘fellow-subjects’ from Cutch and other parts of Western India,—could not preserve with a European the semblance of civility.