Aidoos; the fifth, Poona; and the sixth, Kau. They are governed by the Nooy Nooy Eiry, or grandees, of the island. These provinces are again divided into hopooas, or districts which are in the disposition of the second sort of nobility, called Pekynery Eiry. The hopooas, or districts, are subdivided into farms, which are let to different families of the commonalty. These divisions are very useful, in collecting the revenues, which are paid by the farmers to the king and the nobility, in animals of different sorts, in cloth, and in red and yellow feathers.

REVIOUSLY to the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and the arrival of the Portuguese in the Eastern seas, the knowledge possessed in Europe respecting this coast was extremely unsatisfactory, being almost entirely drawn from the vague accounts of Ptolemy, and the obscure notice of it in the Periplus of the Erythrean sea, a fact that adpears evident from a curious map, now before me, which is entirely built on those authorities, and retains all their errors. The Arabs, it is certain, had for centuries before been intimately conversant with both their ports and its value, having established settlements on several points of the continent, and some of the islands adjacent, that gave them the complete command of its resources and its commerce; but their accounts of it were at that time unknown in Europe, and even those, with which we have since become acquainted, are most of

them, like the general mass of Arabian geography, short, confused and written with a very inaccurate knowledge of the actual, as well as relative, positions of the countries described.

The following early description by one of their most celebrated writers, Zannedin Omar ibn l' Wardi, is the most interesting I am acquainted with, and as it has never before (10 my knowledge) been translated, may be acceptable to the reader. I am enabled to give it through the kind assistance of a friend, who made it out from three copies of the "Kheridat al ajaieb wa feridat al goraieb," written by the above author, which I brought over from Arabia.

The land of the Zinjii lies opposite to that of Sind; between the two intervenes the breadth of the Sea of Persia. The inhabitants are the blackest of the negro race; they worship idols, are brave, hardy and

fight in battle riding on oxen, as their country supplies neither horses, mules, nor camels. Massoudi says, I have seen their oxen kneel like camels to be laden, and they travel as fast with their burthens.' Their habitations extend from the extre. mity of the gulph (supposed Gardafui) to the low land of gold (Sofala 'til Dhab.) This country is extensive, and abounds in gold, grain, and the treasures of nature, and their towns are populous; each town lying adjacent to the branch of a river. Snow is not known among them, nor rain, which is commonly the case with the greater part of the country of the blacks. They have no ships, but traders come in vessels from Ummaun, to buy their children, whom they sell in different countries. The Zinji are extremely numerous, though deficient in the means of carrying on war. It is said that their king goes forth to battle with three thousand followers riding on oxen. The Nile is divided above their country at the mountain of Muksim. Most of the natives sharpen their teeth, and polish them to a point. They traffic in elephants' teeth, panthers' skins and silk. They have islands in the sea, from which they collect cowries to adorn their persons, and they use them in traffic one with another at an established rate. Adjoining to these lies the land of the Dum-adum." (Here we certainly have a description of the Galla) "It is situated on the Nile, bordering on the Zinji.

The inhabitants are in fidels, and the Tartars among the blacks, consisting of savage tribes of freebooters, who continually take captive and plunder ever thing that falls in their way. In their country the river divides; one branch going towards Egypt, and the other

to the country of the Zinji. Sofala 'til Dhab adjoins the eastern borders of the Zinji; it is an extensive district, and mines of iron are found in it, which the people of the country work and sell to the traders from Ind, who give a high price for it, on account of its being harder and of better temper than that which they obtain in their own country, and they purify it, and make it into steel, which admits of a durable edge; the natiyes themselves also make swords of it, and other offensive weapons. The most remarkable produce of this country is its quantity of native gold that is found, in pieces of two or three Meskalla weight; in spite of which, the natives generally adorn their persons with ornaments of brass."

From this extract, it appears that a direct trade from India to this coast was very early established, and that the former country was supplied with iron from Sofala, a circumstance somewhat strange, but by no means incredible, as plenty of iron is still to be met with in the interior; and several of the northern tribes of the Kaffers are at the present day known to have considerable skill in working this metal.

When the Portuguese in the beginuing of the sixteenth century examined the coast, they found the whole of it in the undisturbed possession of the Arabs; but the fame of the gold mines, and the convenience of the ports, as resting places for the Indian trade, shortly induced them to drive out, or reduce to subjection, these original settlers. Their superiority in arms enabled them speedily to accomplish this object. In 1505-6, they gained by treachery, permission to establish the Fort of Sofala; about the same time they conquered Quiloa, and

there

there erected a fort; and in 1508 (Vide Marmol, p. 129, ch. xxxvi) established the one I have described on the Island of Mosambique. They also proceeded to encroach gradually on the Mahomedan possessions in the river Zambezi, which led to the gold marts in the interior; and in 569 or thereabouts, they completely cleared that river of the Arabs, by putting to death, or, in plainer terms, murdering all those that remained, on an unproved charge of having attempted to poison some Portuguese horses; though the real cause appears to have been, that, as they were proceeding on an incursion into the interior, they did not dare to leave them behind.

To follow any European settlers through the scenes of bloodshed and injustice by which they have established their foreign possessions is an ungrateful and disgusting task. It will here be sufficient to observe, that, in the atrocity of the means which the Portuguese used to attain their purposes in the East, they were not behind-hand with the Spaniards in the west. Their success, however, was by no means parallel; the natives of Africa were not tame enough, like the feeble inhabitants of South America, to crouch at the feet of an invader, or to yield their country without a struggle. On the contrary, they from the first undertook, and maintained a kind of warfare, which, if not always successful, at least deserves to be so; they fought, and they retired; they left their towns and their plantations a prey to the devastations of the foe, but, the instant he relaxed from pursuit or rested on his arms, they returned with redoubled vigour to the attack, and made him pay dearly for

1814.

his ravages. This prudent system of defence saved their country from being overwhelmed; and the Portuguese in repeated expeditions to get at the mines, which formed the main object of their pursuit, were invariably foiled.

"The most daring of these attempts was undertaken at the immediate command of Sebastian the First, in 1570, by Francis Baretto, who for this express purpose was made Governor-General of Mosambique. In the first instance he fitted out from Sofala a formidable armament, with the design of penetrating into the country of Chicanga, and getting possession of the mines of Manica, in order to reach which it was necessary for him to pass through the dominious, and close to the capital, of the Quitéve, or chief ruler of the intervening districts, whose power extended in a line across from Sofala to the angle made by the turn of the river Zambezi.

"This country is commonly called Monomotapa, in the accounts of which a perplexing obscurity has been introduced, by different authors having confounded the names of the districts with the titles of the sovereigns, indiscriminately styling them Quitéve,' Monomotapa,' Benemotapa," Benemotasha,'

Chikanga,' Manika,' Bokaranga,' and 'Mokoranga,' &c. The fact appears to be, that the sovereign's title was Quitéve, and the name of the country Motapa, to which Mono has been prefixed, as in Monoemugi and many other names on the coast-that beyond this lay a district called Chikanga, which contained the mines of Manica, and that the other names were applicable solely to petty districts at that time under the rule of the Quitéve.

This

"This monarch immediately collected a force to oppose Baretto's progress and to prevent his reaching Chicanga, lest the king of that district, who was his declared enemy, should join with the Portuguese. Having, however, in two or three skirmishes found the decided inferiority of his troops, he adopted the wiser resolution of retreating before the enemy, annoying him in his march, and destroying the plantations to prevent their affording sustenance to his pursuers; and at last, when the Portuguese approached his capital, the Quitéve retired into a neighbouring forest, "abandoning instead of defending," as the Portuguese insist he ought to have done," the dwellings of his people;" at the same time his subjects, who knew the country intimately, cut off a great number of the straggling soldiers.

Baretto, greatly annoyed by this conduct, and the total evacuation of Zimbaoa, burnt it, and continued his march to Chicanga, the king of which was at that time a Mahomedan. He received the Portuguese with apparent attention, as they abstained from all acts of hostility and professed themselves friends; yet, though he promised them access to his dominions for the purposes of trade, he at the same time gave them little satisfaction respecting the mines, as is evident from the attempt to cover their disappointment by the assertion, "that the risk and labour attending the procuring and cleansing the gold rendered it unworthy of their notice." Thus baffled in their main pursuit, and having lost a great number of men, it was time to make their way back, which they were fortunate enough to effect by patching up a treaty with the Quitéve, in which they

agreed for the future to pay a tribute of two hundred pieces of cloth annually for a passage through his dominions. Such was the end of what J. Dos Santos Calls "the glorious expedition of the great Baretto, whose actions so much excite the envy of nations."

"The second expedition was of a similar description, but still more disastrous in its termination.

"It was undertaken from the settlement at Send on the river Zambezi against the Mongas, whom I conceive to be tribes of the same people I have described under the name of Monjou. I am led to this conclusion, not only from the similarity of the names, but from the resemblance of the native language given by J. Dos Santos to that of the Monjou in my vocabulary, a circumstance that also makes me incline to believe it not improbable that the same language may be spoken throughout all the dominions of the Quitéve. The Mongas, after a severe conflict, were in the first instance defeated, owing to their reliance on the incantations of an old woman, pretending to the character of a sorceress, who led them on to the combat, and who unluckily was killed by a cannon ball in the first onset, a circumstance so agreeable to the views of the Portuguese general, that he rewarded the gonner with a gold chain from his own neck. The result of this hardgained battle was a truce, by which the Portuguese were to be allowed free admittance into the country. This enabled them in some degree to examine the interior, and for the first time they passed the forest of Lupata, which they foolishly named "the spine of the world," on aecount of" the high and terrible rocks by which it is environed, that

appear,

appear, as well as the trees, to stretch their heads into the clouds." From this probably exaggerated description sprung that tormidable chain of mountains which has ever since ornamented the maps of Eastern Africa, furnishing a'remarkable instance of the ill effects that may arise from a name originally being misapplied.

"From Lupata the Portuguese advanced eastward, in hopes of reaching the silver mines of Chicova, and, as they confined themselves during this march to the line of the river Zambezi, they met with little opposition, the natives having, as before, retired to the woods: still all their search after the valuable commodity they looked for proved fruitless, and their leader was at last, as it is said, ingeniously outwitted by one of the natives, who hid some silver in the ground, and persuaded the Portuguese it was a mine. Soon afterwards, being unable to maintain a large force in the country, they retired to Senà, leaving two hundred men in a new fort constructed at Tête, with positive orders not to give up the enterprise until the party had discovered the object of their research. All trouble, however, on this head was unavailing; for the whole detachment, together with its unfortunate leader Autony Cardosa d'Almeyda, was drawn into an ambuscade by the natives, and cut off to a man.

"Since this period the Portuguese have been compelled to act chiefly on the defensive, and to content themselves, like their predecessors the Arabs, with carrying on the trade in a more quiet way, keeping up their influence in the country by setting the native powers in opposition to each other, and confining

themselves solely to the coast, and the line of the river Zambezi.

To maintain even these they have had several severe struggles, particularly in the years 1589 and 1592 (Purchas, Part II. p. 1554, and Hist. de l'Ethiopie, p. 141), when they were attacked on the northern bank of the Zambezi by an inroad of a wandering and ferocious tribe of Muzimbas, who appear at this time to have been passing by on their progress from the south-west. The description which is given of this people and of many of their customs, of their activity, roving disposition, mode of warfare, and particularly the direction which they subsequently took, lead to the conclusion that they were tribes of Galla; for the last account we have of the Muzimbas states, that they reached Quiloa in 1593, and thence passed on to Melinda, where they were stopped by a tribe of natives called Mossequeios, and the first we hear of the Galla is at Patta, where they were seen by Jerome Lobo in 1625; and it was about the same time that they made from that point their first inroad into Abyssinia.

"The endeavours of the Portuguese to introduce the Catholic religion into the country proved as abortive as their schemes of conquest; for, though, by the daring enthusiasm of a fanatic named Peter Gonsalvo de Sylva, they gained in 1571 (Vide Pory's Africa, p. 414) access to the court of the Quitéve, and made an impression on the mind of that sovereign, yet shortly afterwards the Mahomedan traders gained the ascendancy, and De Sylva himself fell a martyr to the cause he had espoused. As to the numbers stated to have been baptized, it will be found, I fear, that the Portuguese

I 2

priests