148 GOVERNOR AT SHUPANGA. CHAP. VI. river's mouth. A Portuguese naval officer was subsequently sent by his government to examine the different entrances. He looked only, and then made a report, in which our published soundings were used without acknowledgment. His own countrymen smiled at the silly vanity exhibited by their government in thus seeking information, and all the while pretending to antecedent knowledge. When opposite Expedition Island, the furnace bridge of our steamer broke down, as it had often done before. Luckily, it occurred at a good place for game, so we got buffalo beef and venison while it was undergoing repair. On the 31st of December, 1859, we reached Shupanga, where we had to remain eight days, awaiting the arrival of cotton cloth from Quillimane. Gray calico or sheeting is the usual currency of Eastern Africa, and this supply was to serve as money during our expedition into the interior. The governor and his two handsome grown-up daughters were staying in the Shupanga house. It is seldom that the Portuguese show any repugnance to being served by blacks, but he preferred to be waited on by his daughters, and they performed their duty with graceful ease. This was the more agreeable to us, inasmuch as one rarely meets the Portuguese ladies at table in this country. His excellency, talking in no way confidentially, but quite openly—indeed, it is here the common mode of speaking of lamentable truths- said that the Portuguese in this country were a miserable lot, quite debased by debauchery, and with no enterprise whatever. A few of the large slaveholders, had they any vigor left, might each send fifty or a hundred slaves to the Cape, Mauritius, and England, to learn sugar-making and trades, after which they could manufacture their own cloth from cotton grown on the spot, and make their own sugar too, instead of CHAP. VI. PORTUGUESE CUNNING. 149 importing it from abroad: he saw no reason even why they should not ere long have a railroad across the continent to Angola! His excellency's remarks exhibit a failing often noticed among the Portuguese, and resembling that of certain of our countrymen, who take a foolish pride in deriding every thing English. If we may judge by our own impressions, strangers would either regret to hear a man, as we often have, winding up a tirade with the climax "I am horribly ashamed that I was born a Portuguese," or would despise him. His observations also showed the magnificent ideas that are entertained, to the entire neglect of plain matter-offact business and industry. Indigo six feet high was growing self-sown in abundance at our feet; superior cotton was found about a mile off, which had propagated itself in spite of being burned off annually for many years; and sugarcane is said to be easily cultivated on the greater part of the Zambesi delta; but, instead of taking the benefit, in a common-sense way, of these obvious advantages, our friends, while indulging in magnificent dreams of a second East India Company, to be established by English capitalists in Eastern Africa, were all the while diligently exporting the labor to the Island of Bourbon. The programme of this English Company, carefully drawn out by a minister of the crown at Lisbon, provides with commendable stringency for the erection of schools and bridges, the making of roads, and deepening of harbors, in this land of "Prester John," all to be delivered back to the Portuguese at the lapse of twenty years! His excellency adverted to the notorious fact that the home government of Portugal had to uphold the settlements in Eastern Africa at an annual loss of £5000, while little or 150 CONFESSIONS OF À SLAVE-TRADER. CHAP. VI. no trade went thence to Lisbon, and no Portuguese ever made a fortune and retired to spend it at home. It is, indeed, matter of intense regret that statesmen, known by the laws they have enacted to be enlightened men, should be the means of perpetuating so much misery in this slave-making country, by keeping out other nations, with a pretense to dominion where they have absolutely no power for good. Is it not paying too dearly for a mere swagger in Europe to have to bear the odium of united Christendom as the first to begin the modern ocean slave-trade, and the last to abandon it? A worn out slave-trader, sadly diseased, and nearly blind, used to relate to us in a frank and open manner the moving incidents of his past career. It was evident that he did not see slavery in the same light as we did. His countrymen all knew that the plea of humanity was the best for exciting his liberality, and he was certainly most generous and obliging to us. On expressing our surprise that so humane a man could have been guilty of so much cruelty as the exportation of slaves entailed, he indignantly denied that he had ever torn slaves away from their homes. He had exported "brutos do mato," beasts of the field alone — that is, natives still wild, or lately caught in forays. This way of viewing the matter made him gravely tell us that, when his wife died, to dull the edge of his grief he made a foray among the tribes near the mouth of the Shire, and took many captives. He had commenced slave-trading at Angola and made several fortunes, but somehow managed to dissipate them all in riotous living in a short time at Rio de Janeiro. "The money a man makes in the slave-trade,” said he, "is all bad, and soon goes back to the devil." Some twelve years since he embarked with a lot of ivory from |