Bishop Mackenzie was placed, and who certainly had not
given up their own right of appeal to the sword of the
magistrate, was, that the new head of the Mission had gone
to extremes in the opposite direction from his predecessor,
not even protesting against the one monstrous evil of the
country, the slave-trade. The most heartless axiom that
ever issued from a Missionary s mouth, “ one black face is
as good as another to me,” was never uttered by Mackenzie;
nor did it find a chord of sympathy in true English hearts.
We believed that we ought to leave the English name in
the same good repute among the natives that we had found
i t ; and in removing the poor creatures, who. had lived with
Mackenzie as children with a father, to a land where the
education he began would be completed, we had the aid and
sympathy of the best of the Portuguese, and of the whole
native population. The difference between shipping slaves
and receiving these free orphans struck us as they came on
board. As soon as permission to embark was given, the rush
into the boat nearly swamped her—their eagerness to be safe
on the Pioneer’s deck had to be repressed.
Bishop Tozer had already left for Quillimane when we took
these people and the last of the Universities’ Missionaries on
board and proceeded to the Zambesi. It was in high flood. We
have always spoken of this river as if at its lowest, for fear lest
we should convey an exaggerated impression of its capabilities
for navigation. Instead of from five to fifteen feet, it was now
from fifteen to thirty feet, or more, deep. All the sandbanks
and many of the islands had disappeared, and before us rolled
a river capable, as one of our naval friends thought, of carrying
a gunboat. Some of the sandy islands are annually swept
away, and the quantities of sand carried down are prodigious.
The process by which a delta, extending eighty or one
hundred miles from ' the sea, has been formed may be seen
going on at the present day—the coarser particle^ of sand are
driven out mto the ocean, just in the same way as we see they
are over banks in the beds of torrents. The finer portions are
caught by the returning tide, and, accumulating by successive
ebbs and flows, become, with the decaying vegetation, arrested
by the mangrove roots. The influence of the tide in bringing
back the finer particles gives the sea near the mouth of the
Zambesi a clean and sandy bottom. This process has been
going on for ages, and, as the delta has enlarged eastwards, the
river has always kept a channel for itself behind. Wherever
we see an island all sand, or with only one layer of mud in it,
we know it is one of recent formation, and that it may be swept
away at any time by a flood; while those islands which are
all of mud are the more ancient, having in fact existed ever since
the time when the ebbing and flowing tides originally formed
them as parts of the delta. This mud resists the action of
the river wonderfully. I t is a kind of clay on which the
eroding power of water has little effect. Were maps made,
showing which banks and which islands are liable to erosion,’
it would go far to settle where the annual change of the
channel would take place; and, were a few stakes driven
m year by year to guide the water in its course, the river
might be made of considerable commercial value in the
hands of any energetic European nation. No canal or
railway would ever be thought of for this part of Africa
A few improvements would make the Zambesi a ready means
o transit for all the trade that, with a population thinned by
ortuguese slaving, will ever be developed in our day. Here
there is no instance on record of the natives flocking in
thousands to the colony, as they did at Natal, and even to the
Arabs on Lake Nyassa. This keeping aloof renders it unlikely
that in Portuguese hands the Zambesi will ever be
of any more value to the world than it has been.
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