Zanzibar; city, island, and coast. Vol. 1 (of 2)Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Zanzibar; city, island, and coast. Vol. 1 (of 2)
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, East -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Tanzania -- Zanzibar; Zanzibar -- Description and travel
Dr Ruschenberger, repeated by a modern traveller, informs us that there
are ‘four minor reefs, looking like great arks, whose bows and sterns
hang bushing over the waters.’ As all the plans show, there are five.
The northernmost link of the broken chain is Champáni (not ‘Chapany’),
the Isle des Français of French charts. It became a God’s-acre for
Europeans, whose infidel corpses here, as at Maskat, and in ancient
Madeira before the days of Captain Cook, had during less latitudinarian
times the choice of the dunghill of the cove, or of a hole in the
street. Formerly it was frequented by turtle-fishers and egg-seekers:
‘black Muhogo,’[18] however, has been scared away by visions of fever-
stricken, yellow-faced ghosts rising ghastly from the scatter of
Christian graves. The bit of sandy bush, distinguished from its
neighbours by absence of tall trees, is frequented (1857) by naval and
commercial Nimrods, with ‘shooting irons’ and ‘smelling dogs,’ curs with
clipped ears and shorn tails, bought from bumboat men: _en bon
chasseurs_, they shoot the Sayyid’s little antelopes which troop up
expecting food; and sometimes these sportsmen make targets of certain
buff-coloured objects imperfectly seen through the bushes. The
mouldering sepulchres in their neglected clearings make the prospect of
a last home here peculiarly unsavoury, almost as bad as in Brazilian
Santos. Yet there are traditions of French picnics visiting it to eat
monkey—a proceeding which might have been interrupted _en ville_.
Westward the line of natural breakwaters is prolonged by Kibondiko, Le
Ponton, or the Hulk. A mere mass of jungle, it has never been utilized.
The eye, however, rests with pleasure upon the sheet of sparkling foam
tumbling white over its coralline outliers, backed by dark purple-blue
distance, and fronted by tranquil, leek-green shoal water. Connected
with its neighbour by a reef practicable at low tides, it is separated
from Changu, or Middle Island, by ‘French channel,’ deep enough for men-
of-war. The shoals about it supply a small rock-oyster. The Crustacea,
however, is uncultivated, and amongst Moslems it is _escargot_ to the
typical John Bull.
The most important is Báwi or Turtle Island, a low, dry bank, slightly
undulated, with a beautifully verdant undergrowth, fringed and tasseled
with the tallest cocoas. The Chelonian (K’hasa) of the East coast, eaten
in April and May, by no means equals that of Fernando Po or of
Ascension; moreover, here no man is master of the art and mystery of
developing callipash and callipee. Turtle, cooked by a ‘cook-boy,’
suggests the flesh of small green Saurians (Susmár), which the haughty
Persians of Firdausi thus objected to their Semitic neighbours—
‘Can the Arab’s greed thus have grown so great,
From his camels’ milk and his lizards’ meat,
That he casts on Kayyanian crowns his eye?
Fie on thee! thou swift-rolling world, O fie!’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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